W-Grass

Westminster Grid Application Support Service

The Grid offers users the opportunity to run existing applications more quickly and efficiently, and also to create ambitious new applications, without investing in extra hardware, and software resources. However, converting existing applications into Grid applications, and also creating new applications, currently requires significant Grid knowledge, which many users do not have.

To help these users, the University of Westminster provides the Westminster Grid Application Support Service (W-GRASS) which has the aim of supporting users in the migration of their existing applications onto the Grid, and in the creation of brand new Grid applications.

Objectives of the Service:

• To identify and approach those users who have compute and data intensive applications but do not yet use the Grid.
• To analyse these applications in collaboration with their users and identify those applications that can be “gridified”,
• To Grid-enable the selected applications, i.e. to migrate and run these applications on desktop Grids, such as BOINC-based Grids, or computational Grids, such as Enabling Grids for e-Science (EGEE), National Grid Service (NGS), Open Science Grid (OSG) and TeraGrid (TG) or on both.
• To train users how to run these applications on the Grid.