Desktop Grid:Westminster Local DG
The University of Westminster Local Desktop Grid
The University of Westminster Local Desktop Grid connects laboratory PCs of the university into a BOINC based Desktop Grid infrastructure. The university is set over four main campuses and some additional smaller locations in Central- and North-West-London each of them offering a variable number of mainly windows based PCs for teaching purposes. The table below summarizes the approximate number of machines offered by these locations and the figure gives an overview of the geographical location of the campuses.
The University of Westminster Local Desktop Grid currently includes over 1500 registered machines. These machines are available for desktop grid computations whenever they are switched on but not utilised by students for teaching or other purposes.
The infrastructure is utilized by several research groups of the University to run computationally intensive applications more quickly and efficiently. The full list of applications running on the Desktop Grid, ranging from protein molecule simulations to on-line video rendering, can be found here.
You can access the UoW Local Desktop Grid from any machine inside the University of Westminster here
Users can submit computations to the Westminster Local Desktop Grid from the DG-portal. The portal provides a high level user interface to submit DG applications and to retrieve results. The figure below is an illustration of the portal user interface for a biomolecular simulation application.
