Trials and Tribulations of the UK National Grid Service

The UK national grid service (NGS) is responsible for standardised access to data and compute resources across UK academia regardless of research area. The NGS has been in production for four years and is currently in its second iteration with planning for NGS III currently at an advanced stage. This paper examines the organisational structure of the NGS which has a distributed structure across four core sites as well as partner and affiliate sites. Management structures including details of the responsibilities of the five main NGS management boards are discussed as well as the benefits and disadvantages of the current structure. Due to the distributed nature of the NGS, challenges in managing are apparent and need to be tackled. Several of these challenges are described and the actions taken by NGS management to address these are detailed.