Working with GridPP
GridPP has developed a UK-based computing Grid for particle physics, but many of the people and institutions involved with GridPP work with industry and in related projects. If you’d like to know more about how your company can benefit from access to GridPP and its team of data scientists and technical experts, please get in touch, but you can also read more about what our users have achieved in the case studies featured here.
What we can offer you
- Access to thousands of CPU cores and Petabytes of storage, suitable for massively-parallelisable computing tasks, for new user communities (up to 10% of GridPP’s computing resource, in principle). See here for some examples of problems we’ve solved for our users with GridPP technology and resources;
- A GridPP-customised Virtual Machine image based on CernVM technology – as used by scientists at CERN‘s Large Hadron Collider – for software testing before rolling out to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid via GridPP’s “Incubator” Virtual Organistions and the CernVM File System;
- User support via the GridPP UserGuide and the GridPP Collaboration’s community of distributed computing experts.
Try it yourself
You can see what the Grid has to offer you and your organisation straight away. By following our UserGuide, you’ll be able to:
- Create your own local Grid node with a CERN Virtual Machine (CernVM);
- Get a Grid certificate – your X.509 passport to the Grid;
- Join one of our “incubator” Virtual Organisations (VOs);
- Submit and manage test jobs with GridPP DIRAC;
- Upload and download data to GridPP Storage Elements (SEs);
- Deploy your software to the Grid with the CernVM File System (CernVM-FS).
If the tools on offer meet your needs, we can talk about creating your own Virtual Organisation in order to harness the full power of GridPP resources for you and your organisation’s user community.
Get started with GridPP by following the GridPP UserGuide – click here
Industry-oriented projects
In addition to our case studies, you can find overviews of GridPP’s industry-oriented projects in the list below.
Projects with commercial partners
LUCID – Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL)
The Langton Ultimate Cosmic ray Intensity Detector (LUCID) was designed by students at the Langton Star Centre and built by engineers at SSTL. Launched on Tuesday the 8th of July 2014 aboard SSTL’s TechDemoSat-1, LUCID uses five Timepix detectors to measure properties of the space radiation environment in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). GridPP is working with the Langton Star Centre, CERN@school, and SSTL to process, store, and share the data with schools and scientists across the country. Read more about how LUCID uses the Grid in the case study here.
Econophysica Econophysica is a small company working with researchers at Queen Mary,University of London looking at mathematical models for commodity trading.
IMENSE (formerly Cambridge Ontology)
Formed in 2004 by researchers at Cambridge University, Cambridge Ontology developed a text-driven, content-based image retrieval technology. The technology can automatically categorise all elements of an image without human tagging or other metadata.
Dell
Oxford and Dell-UK worked with Dell more closely in leading Grid applications and to help build up the Dell-UK research programme.
HP Labs
The SouthGrid consortium had a joint development project in collaboration with HP Labs, Bristol. HP is a major player in Grid development and standardisation, and the first industrial partner in the CERN wLCG project. A researcher at the University of Bristol, was funded jointly by HP and GridPP, worked to attach SouthGrid hardware resources, including those of HP Labs, to the UK particle physics Grid. HP is also a leading vendor of 64-bit computing platforms, and will provide valuable assistance to GridPP and LCG in the porting of both physics applications and Grid middleware in order to take full advantage of increasingly cost-effective 64-bit processors.
Academic projects
IPv6
As the world runs out of IPv4 addresses, the move to IPv6 becomes evermore important – particularly with the restart of the Large Hadron Collider in 2023/2024.
e-Science Centres
GridPP is part of the UK e-science programme, which has been running since November 2000, and is very involved in the community. As such members of the collaboration hold positions in their local and national e-Science centres.
CERN@school
CERN@school gives secondary schools across the country the opportunity to become engaged in university-level physics research. It also provides the chance to have a real piece of CERN technology, as used in the Large Hadron Collider, in school laboratories. CERN@school is working with GridPP to give students access to computing resources for data analysis, simulation work, and introductory coding projects.
Physical Science Information Practices
A project from the London School of Economics funded by Funded by Research Information Network. it seeks to explore the information processing behaviour of physical science research communities when confronted with complex problem solving tasks.
If you’d like to know more, please contact us to arrange a meeting with one of the team.