Brown opening the centre

In the coming years, e-Science or Grid technologies will get super-computers connected to the net to harness their processing power to work on some of the most intractable scientific problems.

In the same way that the internet only really took off when the web and browsers appeared and hid the terrifying complexity of the underlying network, so the Grid aims to put a friendly face on the software needed to get supercomputers talking.

Ultimately, Grid technology will mean scientists can simply submit their data to be processed without knowing, or caring, where the number crunching is actually being done.

Changing science

Although only officially opened this week, the National e-Science Centre was established in summer 2001 with a grant of �5.5m.

The University of Edinburgh is home to the e-Science Institute which serves as the co-ordinating body for grid computing in the UK and encourages other institutions to participate, organises training courses and co-ordinates research.

There are eight regional centres that co-ordinate the UK's e-Science programme. They include the research councils' central laboratory at Daresbury, London's Imperial College and Queen's University in Belfast.

The advent of grid technologies could change the way that many institutions practise science.

All institutions currently maintain their own computing facilities but, until now, these have largely existed as islands of computation that rarely work together.

Power on tap

Grid technologies will mean that smaller institutions get access to more computer power than they could ever afford by themselves.

The larger research labs benefit, too, because they get access to a pool of raw computer processing power that even they would struggle to fund independently.

Currently, many academics spend some of their time recreating or reworking data that scientists at other universities and research centres have already gathered.

The grid aims to make it easier for researchers to find out the results of experiments conducted elsewhere and to help them analyse the existing data so they can do more meaningful science.