Submitting jobs to the Grid:

The eResearch team runs a dormant EGI grid site, ZA-UCT-ICTS. Currently it is unused by researchers but is still active as part of the European Grid Infrastructure.

Grid Computing differs somewhat from HPC computing. Grid Computing refers to the sharing of HPC resources between controlling domains, in this case academic and research institutions, focusing on a particular problem solving method. Grid computing differs from Cloud Computing in that Grid Computing is distributed computing in a loosely coupled network whereas Cloud Computing is essentially internet based provisioning of IT services.

ICTS eResearch have integrated several cluster nodes into the South African National Computing Grid. The enablement of this service allows for national and international collaboration between institutions.

Feature	Description
User Interface	The user interface, or UI, is a service through which jobs are submitted to the computing grid. The UI authenticates users granting them access to grid resources.
Information Index	The Top Level Information Index for South Africa. This allows researchers to determine what resources are available to them nationally.
Workload Management System	A service used to determine at which destination site a computational job will be executed.
Computing Element	The computing element is considered to be the head node of a cluster. The head node will submit jobs for execution on the worker nodes on behalf of the users.
Worker Nodes	Worker nodes do the actual computational work. These are powerful machines with considerable computing capability and memory.
Logical File Catalogue	LFC is the service which maintains mappings between LFC, GUID, and SURLS
AMGA server Regional Certificate Authority	Metadata Service UCT HPC staff have the authority to identify South African researchers and grant them access to international resources. This service is based on collaborative agreements between the South African National Grid and other international projects.