The goal of the NGS is to deliver a production quality national e-infrastructure (computational and data management services) in support of academic research across all Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) in the UK. Specifically the project will deliver core services and support activities to facilitate collaborative access to computing and data resources in support of UK researchers. These services will, as required, integrate with partner infrastructures in Europe, the USA, and elsewhere in the world, thereby ensuring that UK researchers can effectively and efficiently exploit facilities and collaborations across the world. The National Grid Service has developed as a framework for collaborative use of computing and data infrastructures across projects and institutions. The focus of the NGS is in supporting research collaborations, which may be distributed and come together as an ad-hoc arrangement that changes with time, through the development of a persistent common e-infrastructure. Through its programme of driving the adoption of open standards based solutions the NGS is facilitating common access mechanisms to such facilities, enabling intra-institutional collaboration to become a day to day reality in the pursuit of research. Through its active collaborations with international grid activities such as EGEE and the Teragrid , the NGS has also been successful in facilitating international research projects such as the current GENIUS project (provisioning and supporting lightpath connections, using ja.net Lightpath ), and its previous work under the RealityGrid project, the Integrative Biology project (bringing distributed data management to a new community) and astronomers using the Sloane Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).The UK NGS, with its connections into Europe through EGEE , DEISA and potentially PRACE , puts the UK in a strong position to exploit both current and future research infrastructures across Europe. A position which will be jeopardised without the NGS.Looking towards the future the NGS has a clear role in continuing to drive the adoption of standards based approaches for collaborative research across institutional boundaries within the UK by: - enabling HEI and researcher access to the wide range of resources already established through the NGS and leveraging existing and future authentication services such as the federation. - integrating HEI resources and researchers into the national and international framework. - integrating further resources and thereby increasing the pool of computational and data facilities. - enabling a wide range of community-led support programmes to exploit a persistent common infrastructure. - delivering core services in support of collaborative research. - engaging with appropriate standards bodies (e.g. OGF ) to develop effective standards based on user and community requirements.In achieving this, the NGS needs to continue to build on the technical achievements to date and to further the models for brokering of resources between institutes, enhance the environment for the provision of shared services, and to facilitate models with institutes for sustaining the resources into the future. For users the NGS must continue to promote and facilitate training at all levels in order to utilise this developing UK e-Infrastructure and to provide visibility of UK e-infrastructure on the international stage.
