UK National Grid Service welcomes its first SRIF3 funded resource

The University of Keele is one of three new institutions to recently contribute resources to the UK National Grid Service (NGS). What makes this new addition particularly exciting is that Keele is the first institution to contribute their SRIF3 (Science Research Investment Fund) funded resource to the NGS. Prof. Peter Styles, Director of the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics Research Institute at Keele said "We are one of the smaller UK universities with a compute cluster but we feel that we punch well above our weight in these bespoke modelling areas and we are proud that we have been able to procure SRIF3 resource to support these and to be able to play a part in what must be the way forward in being able to deal with scientific problems which require larger model spaces and higher and higher resolutions." The resources at Keele are already used by several research groups investigating astrophysical simulations, 3-d modelling of complex electromagnetic systems for ground penetrating radar and simulations of volcanic flow hazard on real volcanoes especially the Merapi volcano in Indonesia. Linking the compute cluster to the NGS will allow these applications and models to be increased in scale Prof Peter Styles explained that "joining the NGS enables Keele to have interaction with the whole of the grid community, to be able to both provide and use capacity more efficiently and to be part of the future of large scale computing." Dr Andrew Richards welcomed the University of Keele to the NGS "Keele joining the NGS shows that grid computing, and the hard work of all those involved with the NGS, is spreading beyond institutions traditionally involved in these areas. It is encouraging for the future of the NGS." New resources have also been contributed to the NGS from the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Glasgow.