Grid

Oxford plays a strong part in the  UK's GridPP Project by being part of SouthGrid.
The local Grid cluster forms Oxford's contribution to the Tier 2 centre. The cluster is located at the Begbroke Science Park.

The cluster supports all the major LHC VOs (Virtual Organisations), and many more which are part of the EGI project.

The LHCb particle physics experiment is developing an object orientated software environment known as Gaudi. This framework is intended to apply to all event data processing applications including trigger, simulation, reconstruction and user analysis. To meet these goals, Gaudi has been designed to be easily customisable to different tasks and to allow for the possibility to incorporate components from other frameworks.

The world-wide-web changed the way we share and distribute information but has
done very little to make computing power or data storage more assessable. So
the aim of the Grid is to build on existing Internet protocols and to develop
`middleware` which will allow simple and transparent use of resources wherever
they may be world wide. We will also need to change our applications so that
they can take advantage of the Grid infrastructure and run efficiently in this
complex environment.