JISC

Start date: 1 August 2003

End date: 1 October 2006

JISC theme(s): e-Research

Committees: JISC Support of Research committee

Supporting researchers in the GRID environment

JISC is funding a variety of activities to support the work of research and researchers. Activities fall in to three categories: training and awareness, pilot support centres, and GRID technology. 

Training and Awareness

For the GRID to reach its full potential within the UK, it is important that is exploited by all researchers, and meets the requirements of the maximum number of users. Whilst GRID technology has been accepted into the daily working practices for many subject areas (such as particle physics and chemistry), take-up has been limited in other areas.

To help improve the use of GRID technologies, JISC is funding two training and awareness programmes to support eSocial Science and the Arts and Humanities.  These are additional supported by investigation in to the usefulness and potential of the Access Grid for researchers. 

Pilot Support Centres

Researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences are generating vast amounts of textual material which are not easily assimilated outside, or even sometimes within, their subject areas. Improved use of this material depends on automated tools which can search large quantities of text and extract semantic meaning from it. Intelligent text mining promises to enable researchers to excavate richer seams of electronic research material, including drawing up precise and tailored summaries personalised to the researcher. As such, JISC is funding a pilot Text Mining Centre to investigate the potential of this activity. 

It is essential that valuable information created by and for researchers in the UK is stored in both a manageable and a durable format that will enable access both for specialists and for the wider research community. The Digital Curation Centre intends to provide a focus for research into data curation issues and to provide training and advice on tools and best practice to enable effective digital curation for each community. This programme has been co-funded by JISC and the eScience Core Programme. 

GRID Technology 

Researchers increasingly need high levels of service from the network in order to carry out daily tasks such as data transport, computational science and remote imaging.  Such requirements are difficult and costly to meet with traditional IP-based networking, and may be best addressed through the use of switched optical networks.  In recognition of this, several leading National Network organizations have created an international experimental testbed to pilot this new method of networking. UKLight is a new facility which allows the UK to join this global initiative. JISC Support for Research committee (JCSR) is funding policy guidance work to support the efforts of the HEFCE financed testbed.  The UKLight facility is managed by UKERNA and closely aligned to work on the national SuperJANET network. 

The UK e-Science GRID provides a national e-Infrastructure test bed that gives access to two high performance compute clusters and to large memory data clusters and is supported by dedicated staff to help new users learn how to best exploit these resources and explore new forms of collaboration for their research. The National Grid Service (NGS) is funded by JCSR in collaboration with the Council for the Central Laboratories of the Research Councils (CCLRC). The NGS will be a valuable environment for evaluating tools and portals developed under JCSR’s Virtual Research Environment initiative. It will also enable exploration of the possibilities for global research GRIDs linking with parallel developments in Europe, Asia and the USA. IA current initiative in this direction involves grid enabling datasets in order to progress toward the establishment of a UK production data grid via the NGS. The national data centres of MIMAS and Edina are working with the NGS to take this forward, for example, through the GEMS project led by MIMAS.

eScience in Education 

JCSR has further funded proof of concept demonstrators in the use of grid technology within the school environment. The demonstrators endeavored to make science more real to students by enabling schools to link to projects occurring in the scientific and grid community and providing a means for the analysis of their own data gathering exercises. For more information, see the  eScience in Education project.

The Support for eResearch programme is associated with the e-Infrastructure programme, the Virtual Research Environment programme and the  Knowledge Management and Semantic Grid programme. 

Events

Joint programme meeting July 2004, Brighton