GridCoord d 1

Annex J - United Kingdom

History

In November 2000 the UK’s Office of Science and Technology announced funding for a UK e-Science Initiative. e-Science refers to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists.

The Initiative was based on the release of additional funding allocations to programmes within each of the UK’s Research Councils, namely,

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  Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
  
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  Medical Research Council (MRC)
  
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  Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
  
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  Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
  
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  Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC)
  
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  Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
  

In addition a Core e-Science Programme was formed as a cross-Council activity to develop and broker generic technology solutions and generic middleware to enable e-Science and form the basis for new commercial e-business software. The Core e-Science Programme was funded by both Office of Science and Technology (OST) and Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and was managed by EPSRC on behalf of all the Research Councils.

The Initiative was led by Dr John Taylor, Director of the Research Councils who coined the term e-Science as

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  ‘e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science, and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.’
  
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  ‘e-Science will change the dynamic of the way science is undertaken.’
  

The Initiative has therefore been devised and led by people in the UK who have a solid understanding of the IT sector both in academia and industry.

Research Approach

The overall goal of the e-Science Core Programme is to identify the key generic middleware requirements arising from e-Science projects. In collaboration with scientists, computer scientists and industry, the programme has a mandate to develop a framework that will promote the emergence of robust, industrial strength Grid middleware that will not only underpin individual application areas but also be of relevance to industry and commerce. There is an Open Source/Open Standards requirement on all middleware developed within this programme.

Phase One of the Core Programme was structured around six key elements:

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  Implementation of a National e-Science Grid Test-bed based on a network of Regional e-Science Centres
  
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  Promotion of Generic Grid Middleware Development
  
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  Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration Grid Projects
  
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  Establishment of a support structure for e-Science Pilot Projects
  
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  Support for involvement in International activities and Outreach activities
  
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  Support for e-Science networking requirements
  

A National e-Science Centre and e-Science Institute was established at Edinburgh University while a number of Regional e-Science Centres were established at Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff, Newcastle, Southampton, Belfast and Imperial College Universities. The National e-Science Institute acts as a focal point for activity engaging with the international community and ensuring that the highest standards of academic excellence and expertise in the UK are maintained. The Regional e-Science Centres are responsible for, among other things, promotion of e-Science within their geographical region.

National & Regional e-Science Centres:

In addition to the National e-Science Centre, Regional e-Science centres were established as follows:

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  Belfast e-Science Centre (BeSC)
  
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  Cambridge e-Science Centre (CeSC)
  
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  e-Science North West (eSNW)
  
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  London e-Science Centre (LeSC)
  
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  North East e-Science Centre (NEeSC)
  
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  Oxford e-Science Centre (OeSC)
  
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  Southampton e-Science Centre (SeSC)
  
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  Welsh e-Science Centre (WeSC)
  

The Centre network was extended during the second year of the programme to include seven Centres of Excellence. The purpose of these Centres is to:

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  Add and coordinate expertise in technologies and applications important to e-Science
  
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  Add experience and resources to the existing UK e-Science Grid
  
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  Add regional coverage to the existing UK e-Science Grid
  
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  Host Access Grid nodes for multi-site remote conferencing.
  

These Centres of Excellence are located at Bristol, Lancaster, Birmingham, Reading, Leicester and York, Sheffield and Leeds universities. The seven Centres of Excellence and their expertise are listed below:

Centre	Area of Expertise
White Rose Consortium (Leeds, Sheffield, York)	Real-time Distributed Design Support and Diagnostic Systems and Real-time Distributed Collaborative Visualisation Services.
Bristol	e-Digital Media, applying digital media techniques to achieve interactivity with e-Science data using the computational power of the Grid and display resources of an Access Grid node
Birmingham	Modelling and Analysis of Complex Systems
Reading (jointly funded with NERC)	Development of environmental web and grid services in collaboration with the Met Office, the Environment Agency and the commercial environmental sector
Leicester (jointly funded with PPARC)	Astronomy, astrophysical modelling and space research and linking into key local activities such as their major involvement in the AstroGrid project and in running the UKAFF national facility.
UCL	Networked systems
Lancaster	e-Social Science - accelerating the development of a new kind of computing and data management infrastructure for the social sciences and supporting the increasingly national and global collaborations emerging in many areas of social science.

The programme has moved into a second phase evolving from the research focussed efforts into a more sustainable/production phase.

In Phase Two of the Core Programme, the main elements are as follows:

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  A continuation of the National e-Science Centre linked to a network of Regional e-Science Centres
  
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  Support Activities for the UK e-Science Community leading to a Grid Operations Centre
  
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  An Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute
  
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  A Digital Curation Centre
  
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  New Exemplars for e-Science
  
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  National and International Outreach
  

More specifically the new components of Phase 2 are:

Grid Operations Centre

As the UK e-Science Grid and community mature there is a need to put in place an operations support activity. The Grid Operations Centre (GOC) brings together the grid support role, the network and grid monitoring role and the support for the National Grid Service (NGS). The NGS is the core UK grid, intended for the production use of computational and data grid resources. NGS is supported by Joint Information Services Committee and is run by the Grid Operations Centre. The NGS initially consists of the 4 dedicated clusters at the University of Manchester, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, White Rose Grid (Yorkshire) and the University of Oxford, and the two national High Performance Computing services, CSAR and HPCx. Thus, the NGS provides access to over 2000 processors, and over 36TB of "data-grid" capacity.

Digital Curation Centre

The Digital Curation Centre has been awarded to a consortium led by the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow, UKOLN, at the University of Bath; the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (which operate the Rutherford and Daresbury Laboratories). The Centre is a joint venture between the Core Programme and JISC, started in January 2004 and is funded for 3 years.

Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII)

The focus of the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII) will be on software engineering of Grid services. The Institute was created in January 2004 (http://www.omii.ac.uk), and a Director has been appointed (Dr Alistair Dunlop). The OMII has published a Roadmap for Grid Middleware in the UK (http://www.omii.ac.uk/OMIIRoadmap.pdf). The Institute has funding of £6.5M over 3 years to build a software stack for the UK e-Science community.