JISC

Start date: 1 January 2006

End date: 31 December 2006

Funding programme: Support for e-Research programme

Project website: http://www.softeng.cse.clrc.ac.uk/CCPForge/index.html

JISC theme(s): e-Research

The Collaborative Computational projects (CCPs) bring together leading UK expertise in key fields of research to tackle large-scale scientific software development, maintenance and distribution. Each project represents many years of intellectual and financial investment. The CCPs provide a software infrastructure on which important individual research projects can be built.  During 2003/2004 the CCP programme undertook a review of its needs and requirements. Three specific goals were identified (1) To make the most of emerging opportunities in cross-disciplinary areas; (2) To adopt more extensive, flexible and easy-to-use methods consistently across the whole CCP community for the continued development and maintenance of codes, using an open-source collaboration model; (3) To convert and update codes as necessary to encourage cross-fertilisation between different sections of the community, and to facilitate long-term maintenance and collaborative development.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to address one of the recommendations of the review. That the CCP programme

Establish a common “SourceForge-like” resource, initially just for the CCPs, but eventually for the wider-CCP community.

Such a facility would address goals 2 and 3 above. Although GForge may well provide a sufficient solution it might not meet all the requirements of the CCP developers. As part of the project the CCPs will review their requirements and the possible software solutions.

The specific objectives are to:

(1) Review the actual requirements of a SourceForge type environment.

(2) Investigate software that can be used to meet these requirements.

(3) Deliver a working server for the software developers working within the CCPs.

Project Methodology

The project is broken down into several phases, each one feeding in to the next:

• Review the actual requirements of a SourceForge type environment.
• Consider the possible software solutions against the requirements and reviewing possible software technologies.
• Install selected software components on server.
• Customisation of basic structure and interfaces to meet CCP requirements.
• Implementation of backup and recovery processes
• Deployment for the community including migration of data.

Implications / Deliverables / Stakeholders

The overarching project outcome will be a central service for software developers and users with interests in the CCP software.  The service will allow collaboration within and between the different CCP groups and allow easier access to the scientific knowledge that has gone in to the software during its development.