Start date: 1 October 2003
End date: 31 August 2008
Funding programme: Support for e-Research programme
Project website:
http://redress.lancs.ac.uk
JISC theme(s): e-Research
Empowering Social Scientists in the Research Grid Environment
Although it is becoming increasingly evident that e-Science is providing new opportunities to promote global cross-disciplinary research collaborations, there are still many areas of social science that have been restricted by the lack of accessible computer power. The Awareness and Training Environment for E-Social Science plans to support social science researchers to move beyond the desktop environment and take advantage of e-science infrastructures and the developing research grid. The project will promote new opportunities and skills available to researchers in order to exploit geographically distributed leading edge data storage, computational and network resources in order to manage and analyse data in a timely and cost effective way.
It is currently very difficult for non-specialists to attain the desired skills levels in computing to deal with the complexities of contemporary Grid platforms, for example effective use of the Globus toolkit and developments. This programme will support both quantitative and qualitative social scientists in achieving these skills in four major areas:
- Applications: in particular the use of packages to support multi-disciplinary, multi-method, computationally-intensive analysis.
- Data: the advantages of e-science developments in supporting data curation, data management, data fusion and the subsequent analysis of this data.
- Methodology: including specialist method and techniques, such as visualisation, which require a Grid to enable large-scale multi-dimensional data to be explored.
- Computational culture: moving beyond the current environment of standard packages written for single processors.
The Awareness and Training Environment will be supported by both JISC and ESRC funding for three years in the first instance. Work will include the development of a web-based environment and a series of awareness raising workshops and training sessions for researchers. The programme will also introduce social scientists to supporting technologies, such as Access Grid developments. Although primarily aimed at social scientists it is envisaged that the service will be of benefit to other communities, including arts and humanities research. The JISC is also supporting Grid developments through the Semantic Grid and Autonomic Computing Programme .