e-Science
Centres win continued funding
Four UK e-Science Centres have been awarded grants totalling just
under £4m to continue developing new e-Science technologies and
promote their adoption in academia and industry over the next
five years. The centres are:
-
National e-Science Centre (NeSC, based at the
universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow);
- the
Belfast e-Science Centre (BeSC, based at Queen’s
University Belfast);
- the
South-East Regional e-Research Consortium (SEReRC, based
at Oxford, Reading and Southampton universities);
- the
White Rose Grid e-Science Centre
(based at the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York).
The grants have been awarded
by the UK e-Science Core Programme which is funded and managed by
the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The
funding will enable the centres to provide core staff and
services to run e-Science research projects and to participate in
separately-funded projects that make use of or develop e-Science
tools.
Each centre has already
enjoyed considerable success in providing grid and e-Science
infrastructure and resources locally and engaging the local
research community in projects across a wide range of subject
areas to achieve new, better or different research results. Here
are a few highlights:
NeSC
www.nesc.ac.uk A framework
for clinical trials, developed under the VOTES project which was
funded by the Medical Research Council, is being used in major
studies throughout Europe. The framework provides secure access
to sensitive medical data.
nanoCMOS, funded by the EPSRC,
has developed a grid infrastructure to allow designers of
electronic circuits to work with increasingly small-scale (nano-scale)
transistor devices, the behaviour of which is highly variable,
governed by individual atoms rather than the average behaviour of
large collections of atoms. More than 250,000 jobs (equivalent to
more than 25cpu years) have now been completed. Future projects
are planned which build on these and other successes.
BeSC
www.besc.ac.uk Applications
focus on broadcast and digital media, financial services and
bioinformatics.
The PRISM project, funded by
the Technology Strategy Board, is demonstrating how grid
computing can make content from a variety of digital sources,
including broadcast and web-based media, available to viewers
on-demand from their TV sets.
BeSC is enabling companies in
financial services to make better use of their own computing
infrastructures while fulfilling their legal requirements
especially for data security.
SEReRC
www.oerc.ox.ac.uk
Climateprediction.net, a project funded by the Natural
Environment Research Council, has engaged the spare computing
power of more than 300,000 home computers to run models of future
climate.
The OptiPuter initiative
enables researchers in the UK and US, who have independently
developed two of the worlds most advanced electron microscopes,
to control the other’s instrument from their home institution and
so share resources across the Atlantic.
Virtual globes, such as
Google Earth, are being used to visualise environmental data.
Electronic lab notebooks have
been used to automate high throughput chemistry and biology
experiments from experimental set-up to the publication of
results.
White
Rose Grid e-Science Centre
www.wrgrid.org.uk The
DAME and BROADEN projects have developed a grid infrastructure to
enable Rolls Royce to automate the analysis of signal data from
aeroengines and hence improve its service to its customers.
The Virtual Vellum project
has enabled scholars in remote locations to view images of rare
medieval manuscripts in real time and hence forge new ways of
collaborating.
Grid middleware, developed
with Beihang University in China, is being used to foster
UK-China research collaborations, especially involving industry
and in the social sciences.
Longer articles on some of
the projects mentioned here can be found at
www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience/achievements and on the centres’
websites.
For further information contact
Notes for editors
-
e-Science enables better, new research by
giving researchers access to resources held on widely-dispersed
computers as though they were on their own desktops. The
resources can include many digital data collections, very large
scale computing resources, scientific instruments and high
performance visualisation.
-
A grid allows these different resources to work
together seamlessly across networks, enabling people to share
them, often across traditional boundaries, and form virtual
organizations. The vision is to facilitate collaborative
working in multi-disciplinary teams by providing easy access to
a grid via web interfaces, and powerful tools to organise
computing tasks. e-Science has the potential to smooth out
inequalities in research investment by making resources
available to those who could not afford their own.
-
The UK e-Science Programme is a coordinated
initiative involving all the Research Councils. The Engineering
and Physical Sciences Research Council funds the e‑Science Core
Programme which supports the generic facilities that users and
potential users of e-Science tools and techniques need to
further their research.
-
The UK e-Science Programme as a whole is
fostering the development of IT and grid technologies to enable
new ways of doing faster, better or different research, with
the aim of establishing a sustainable, national
e-infrastructure for research and innovation which meets the
aims of the government’s Investment Framework for Science and
Innovation 2004-2014. e-Science and the e-infrastructure are
thus contributing to the economic success of the UK.
- Further information at
www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience, the National e-Science Centre (NeSC)
www.nesc.ac.uk and the
individual research councils:
-
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
www.ahrc.ac.uk
-
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council (BBSRC)
www.bbsrc.ac.uk
-
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
www.esrc.ac.uk
-
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC)
www.epsrc.ac.uk
-
Medical Research Council (MRC)
www.mrc.ac.uk
-
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
www.nerc.ac.uk
-
Science and technology Facilities Council
www.stfc.ac.uk
This page is maintained by the
White
Rose Grid Coordinator.
