The development comes at the same time as the University has become a more significant contributor to the UK's national higher education computing Grid facility.

The EU-funded project EDGeS, which at Westminster is being co-ordinated by the School of Informatics, has already seen researchers in Biosciences and Media and Arts and Design having successful trials running custom software packages at much faster speed on the new Grid than was previously possible.

Dean of Informatics, Professor Stephen Winter, stated: "The groups we've been working with at the University all have custom software applications that can take anything up to several days to run. On our desktop Grid these applications take minutes. This will bring real benefits to our researchers across a range of subject areas."

The new Grid has been developed in conjunction with Information Systems and Library Services. Director Suzanne Enright stated: "We're delighted to be involved in a collaborative project which will utilize the spare computing capacity of the University's desktop environment, particularly in light of the contribution that it will make towards research and development."

The new desktop Grid will also feed in to the UK's national Grid computing facility for researchers, the National Grid Service (NGS). Established in 2004 and now with over 500 accredited users, the NGS is in use extensively across a wide range of research disciplines.

Westminster recently upgraded its high performance computer cluster (HPCC) and is now contributing 15 percent of the NGS total computing power with its extra HPCC capability.