Industry on the Clyde

The stand, along with the Glasgow ScotGrid team, featured posters highlighting the successes of ScotGrid and GridPP. The Real Time Monitor was also run throughout the day which was a great visual hook attracting curious people to the stand. During the day there was a lot of interest both from industry and from other academics at the university. The researchers were primarily attracted by a global infrastructure with a local sys admin to interact with. For the commercial sector the expertise that has been accumulated by ScotGrid (and GridPP) is very intriguing and at least one company was talking about maybe starting some knowledge transfer projects and industrial placements.

Dug McNab, based at The University of Glasgow, is ScotGrid's Deputy Coordinator and was at the meeting "We publicised our strengths and experience in distributed and petascale computing and advertised the use of our cluster as a state-of-the-art test bed for industry. Feedback from the day was positive with various aerospace and engineering companies discussing grid use-cases, research opportunities. The overriding themes from these discussions were issues surrounding licensed software and knowledge transfer through short term industrial placements."

This is not the first time that Glasgow has been involved in attracting users to grid computing. The Interdiscplinary Research Centre at the university was set up in 2007 and the grid team has been helping users port their applications on to the grid since then, including electrical engineers and optics research. It is hoped that this day will also encourage more use of the grid resources in the region and across the UK.