GridCoord d 1

Funding Structure and Coordination

The e-Science programme was started in 2001 and over a five year period will receive a total OST investment in e-Science of £213m. The programme has seen significant industrial commitment, from major companies ranging from engineering through to the pharmaceutical sector. The UK e-Science research community has also become significantly involved in major EU and other international programmes, including world standards bodies, as well as developing a focused long-term research agenda in computing, essential for maintaining the UK’s leading position in future Grid applications.

In addition, funding was provided for future high performance computing services for EPSRC and other Research Councils, ensuring existing and future national UK high performance computing services will be available over the Grid.

Projects

The Regional e-Science Centres were allocated a centre-specific DTI budget (£3M National e-Science Centre: £1M Regional e-Science Centres) to develop suitable Grid middleware projects collaborating with industry. Each of the nine Regional e-Science Centres project portfolios are detailed below. The criteria for a Centre’s industrial project was that it addressed a generic grid middleware issue that it would result in an open source/open standard solution and that there would be significant industrial collaboration. The extent of the contribution from industry was under the control of the Centre Directors, with the constraint that the portfolio of projects, as a whole, from each Centre must have a 50% contribution from industry. In 2002, the programme has funded 76 projects with industrial partners with approximately £31.5M across all projects. A list of current Centre Projects is given in the Annex.

Interdisciplinary Research Projects

The essential elements of an Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) are a "critical mass" of researchers, a concentration of advanced instrumentation and excellent multi-disciplinary research and training opportunities. IRCs bring together respected researchers from different scientific and technical backgrounds to undertake major, six-year, IT-based research programmes in collaboration with industry.

The EPSRC in the UK has funded three, six-year, computer science oriented, Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations (IRCs). These are major projects that fund key Computer Science research groups from a number of universities to undertake long-term research in three important areas. The Equator project, led by Tom Rodden from Nottingham, is concerned with technological innovation in physical and digital life. The Advanced Knowledge Technologies project (AKT) led by Nigel Shadbolt from Southampton is concerned with the management of the knowledge life cycle. Lastly, the DIRC project, led by Cliff Jones from Newcastle and Ian Sommerville from Lancaster, is concerned with the dependability of computer-based systems. A fourth IRC, jointly funded by EPSRC and the MRC, is the MIAS project led by Mike Brady from Oxford. This application focussed IRC is concerned with translating data from medical images and signals into clinical information of use to the medical profession. The Core Programme has provided further funding to these IRCs. A list of current IRC Projects is given in the Annex.

Pilot projects

In the context of the UK e-Science initiative, a pilot project is a project in an application domain, such as aircraft maintenance or functional genomics, that is pioneering uses of grid middleware and e-Science methods of collecting, curating, integrating, federating analysing and visualising data, and/or is using computational models in the pursuit of scientific, engineering or medical goals. It is anticipated that pilot projects will extend to other domains, such as the arts and humanities, in the near future. A list of Current Pilot Projects is in the Annex.

Demonstrator projects

The demonstrator projects were commissioned to enable groups to assemble demonstrations of methods and technologies pertinent to e-Science. They are chosen because they can quickly deliver a demonstration and because they show methods or technologies which will be useful for a wide range of science applications. A current list of Demonstrator projects is given in the Annex.

A full list of projects active within the UK e-Science Imitative can be found at the National e-Science web site namely: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/projects/escience_projects.html.

Achievements

The programme has quickly demonstrated the utility of e-Science across disciplines in areas ranging from chemistry and biology to astronomy, atmospheric physics, engineering design, materials science and health and medicine. Scientists are engaging with each other in multidisciplinary teams to develop new Grid middleware across many pioneering projects and applications.

In addition a large number of companies are engaged in e-Science projects ranging from major national companies to SMEs.

Links to International and EU activities

It was felt important to ensure that the UK e-Science community is actively communicating and collaborating with the international community. It was therefore desirable to encourage the development of an informed UK community on Grid technologies and provide funding for them to play an active role in the development of internationally agreed Grid protocols at the Global Grid Forum. In particular

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  Involvement in the Global Grid community and Global Grid Forum (GGF)
  
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  Collaboration with key international middleware development teams
  
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  Understanding of other national initiatives and directions
  
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  Engagement with non UK industrial ventures
  

GridNet, is a network project which has a substantial travel budget for attendance of UK experts at relevant standards bodies – the Global Grid Forum, the IETF and W3C.

In the Global Grid Forum, UK researchers are now involved in 20 Working Groups and 23 Research Groups, and leading several of the activities.

The UK programme is also concerned to create meaningful links to international efforts represented by projects such as the EU DataGrid and the US iVDGL projects. Two Grid fellowships have been created for young computer scientists from the UK to participate in these projects.

The e-Science booth at SC03 had more than three times the number of visitors than the same in SC02. Similarly increases were apparent at SC04. e-Science applications were well represented and the UK US TeraGyroid project won the SC challenge.

An annual All Hands Meeting is held each September to enable the community to get together and communicate results and exchange ideas. Over 650 participants attended AHM03 from a wide range of disciplines.

In the 2003 year there have been international meetings with China, USA and Australia, Singapore and Japan. The Directorate provided support and guidance on many international strategies including in Europe, Australia, China, and Singapore.

e-Science centres and researchers within the Core Programme are involved in the major EU Grid initiatives. NeSC is leading the training element of the EGEE project and many sites within the UK are partners. Several sites are members of the CoreGrid, NextGrid and GridCoord projects.