Building the e-Science Grid in the UK: Middleware, Applications and Tools deployed at Level 2

Over the period September 2002-April 2003 the UK Grid Engineering Task Force and staff at Regional e- Science Centres and CCLRC deployed the Globus Toolkit GT2 at 14 sites and on approximately 80 compute resources to set up the first production-quality e-Science Grid for the UK. This work is proving to be exemplary of what can be achieved using heterogeneous resources on a national scale and is feeding discussions on how to link Grids with multiple virtual organisations across Europe. This paper therefore reports on experiences of this deployment exercise, compares with other efforts worldwide and suggests further work to be done.