You can get access to BiG Grid either through your community portal, or directly through specific Grid Middleware that enables you to directly interact with the distributed services. BiG Grid middleware is based on a variety of open source software and uses open standards throughout. Fully integrated with large European projects such as EGEE, and interoperable with many popular grids and data grids, users familiar with the Grid elsewhere can start working immediately with BiG Grid.
Even better, BiG Grid augments popular middleware by fully supporting the Virtual Laboratory for e-Science PoC environment. With a range of popular VL-e software such as the vBrowser, VLeT, Ibis, and Java-GAT, but also many open source tools such as R, R-MPI, FSL, and Octave. Also workflow tools like Tavera are present.
To get started with BiG Grid and the PoC, visit the VL-e web site and download one of the pre-build virtual machine images.
All BiG Grid compute resources have the VL-e PoC distribution pre-installed, so you can rest assured that your favourite software package is already present. The specific version of the PoC supported at each site is published through the BDII information system.