The University of Keele is one of three new institutions to recently contribute resources to the UK National Grid Service (NGS), and the first institution to contribute its SRIF3 (Science Research Investment Fund) funded resource to the NGS.
Professor 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. 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 that require larger model spaces and higher and higher resolutions.’
The resources at Keele are already used by several research groups investigating astrophysical simulations, 3D 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
Styles added: ‘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.’