* Chancellor Gordon Brown is to open the National E-Science Centre at Edinburgh University next Thursday.
The centre, which is being run jointly with Glasgow University, received £5.5 million over three years from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Department for Trade and Industry.
The NeSC will coordinate the United Kingdom's development of the Grid, hailed as Internet 2, and is expected to harness computing power wherever it is found in the world.
Regional e-science centres, providing computing power and databases, have been established at Newcastle, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff, Cambridge and Southampton universities and at Imperial College, London.