Start date: 1 April 2006
End date: 1 March 2009
JISC theme(s): e-Research, Information environment, Access management, e-Resources, Network
Committees: JISC Support of Research committee
Working Groups: E-infrastructure advisory board
Currently, research is increasingly carried out through distributed
regional, national and global collaborations enabled by the
Internet. A feature of such collaborations is that they are built
upon an infrastructure, comprising of grid computing software,
which can provide researchers with shared access to large data
collections, advanced ICT tools for data analysis, large scale computing
resources, and high performance visualisation, among other examples.
e-Infrastructure is the term used for the
technology and organisations that support research undertaken in this
way. It embraces networks, grids, data centres and collaborative
environments, and can include supporting operations centres, service
registries, single-sign on, certificate authorities, training and
help-desk services. Most importantly,
it is the integration of these that defines e-Infrastructure.
A range of e-infrastructure developments is already
maturing: grid computing is now typically used as a basis for the
computation and data management required by collaborative research, and
JISC investments such as in virtual research environments and Shibboleth
are presently being adopted. Concurrently, a new set of common
e-infrastructure functions are emerging , which in turn will enable higher
level, innovative applications to be developed.
Listed below are examples of the current UK
e-Infrastructure, funded by JISC, the UK e-Science programme and joint
JISC/RCUK initiatives:
JISC
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SuperJANET 5
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Integrated Information
Environment
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Virtual Research Environments
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Digital Repositories
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Core Middleware Infrastructure and
Technology Development
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Semantic Grid and Autonomic
Computing
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Shared Services
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Support for eResearch
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Access Grid Support Centre
UK e-Science program
Joint JISC/RCUK
initiatives
Moving into the future, e-Infrastructure has the
potential to build on the world class facilities that have already been
developed to deliver what Atkinson et al have summarised below :
'In the future a pervasive digital infrastructure
will allow computing facilities to be always available via a
heterogeneous range of devices. The infrastructure will seamlessly
combine reliable high-performance computing and communication networks
and variable low-performance embedded or portable devices with integrated
wireless facilities. This will connect scientists in resource-rich labs
to field scientists with limited resources or to remote automated
experiments to form a distributed ubiquitous system. The supporting
infrastructure will need to be open to all legitimate users, promote
heterogeneity and be extremely flexible. Resources will vary in their
availability, their certification of quality and their
reliability.'
What is the e-Infrastructure programme?
The JISC eInfrastructure programme builds on the
work arising from the JSR (JISC Support of Research Committee), the
eScience Core programme, and the OST (Office of Science and Technology)
eInfrastructure Roadmap initiative. It has also been informed by European
and International developments within the Grid and eResearch
communities.
The vision for the programme follows the initial
five year investment in the UK e-Science infrastructure, which is being
developed with other partners to expand the uptake and effective use of the
e-Infrastructure from early adopters and researchers across
disciplines. There are two elements to
this:
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To have enhanced and consolidated the current technologies.
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To have established sustainable communities of use.
Supporting the vision, the main aims of the
e-Infrastructure programme are as follows:
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To increase the benefits to, and use of, e-Infrastructure by a wider user
base.
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To ensure that e-Infrastructure builds on and shares common core services
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To explore the ways in which the benefits of the capabilities being
developed in grid computing can be transferred to other domains.
The e-Infrastructure programme is comprised of four
thematic areas:
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Community engagement and support - Focusing on community engagement
and support in the broader take up and more effective use of
e-Infrastructure
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e-Infrastructure security – Creating solutions to issues of
grid authentication, authorisation and security; establishing
interoperability and consensus between access management
regimes.
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Grid services and tools – Developing production tools and services
to broaden the research community take-up of the computational and data
grid resources within the National Grid Service.
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Knowledge organisation and semantic services – Exploring,
developing and applying semantic grid technologies, semantics-aware
services, protocols for the exchange of metadata, and the use of these to
automate the creation of service workflows and virtual organisations.
What are the benefits for the
community?
The programme has selected the thematic areas to
push e-Infrastructure forward in key development areas and deliver the
following benefits for the research community.
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Broader use of e-Infrastructure within the research community including
the sciences, medicine, arts and humanities and social sciences.
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Increased capability, expertise and effective use of e-Infrastructure.
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Enhanced and easier to use security for the UK grid infrastructure and
virtual organisations, with fair and consistent policies on accounting
and usage.
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Production level software and capabilities for the UK e-Infrastructure
through a well-documented grid service running software that is
production ready.
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New ways of retrieving, processing and archiving data, opening up new
areas of research and expanding existing ones whilst allowing the results
of research to be shared by a broader community.