New eScience centre for Scotland

A state-of-the-art centre bidding to develop a successor to the Internet was opened today by Chancellor Gordon Brown.

The National eScience Centre (NeSC) in Edinburgh is a collaboration between the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and will spearhead the UK's work on major eScience initiatives.

It will focus on pooling huge computing resources and involve collaboration between scientists and industrialists worldwide.The new Grid system, dubbed the 'Internet 2', is designed to cope with the massive increase in the amount of data now used by researchers.But in the long term it is hoped the pioneering work will benefit business, commerce and education.

Outlining its significance Professor Malcolm Atkinson, director of the NeSC, said: "We have only begun to investigate how the Grid can help tackle some of the big challenges facing the scientific community. As was the case with the Internet, we expect it will take around 10 years of research and development to make these benefits routinely available."