National e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow, UK

Our work is focused upon the application of e-Science/e-Research and Grid technologies with particular emphasis upon supporting domains requiring finer grained, user-oriented security. We have a variety of completed and on-going projects in domains such as bioinformatics, clinical trials, epidemiology, electronics, the social sciences amongst numerous others. Our goal is to support research collaborations including those that cross institutional boundaries - this includes inter-disciplinary research collaborations. These typically require access to highly distributed, heterogeneous domain specific data resources, and demand user driven research environments that seamlessly exploit a variety of large scale HPC resources. Our model is to make these environments completely transparent to end users who simply want to undertake their own research and not become immersed in advanced middleware solutions.

Through NeSC and the role of the major HPC facilities on campus such as ScotGrid (www.scotgrid.ac.uk) the University of Glasgow are full partners in the National Grid Service (www.ngs.ac.uk).

We provide training courses on the application of e-Science/Grid technologies as well as how to access and use resources such as ScotGrid or the NGS. We also offer introductory lectures/workshops on the use of these technologies more generally in different application domains.

We offer an Access Grid Service which can be used for larger scale video conferencing. We also have a UK e-Science Certification Authority Regional Operator who is able to verify user identities for the UK Certification Authority (www.grid-support.ac.uk/ca).