RC ICT Conference 17 May 2004 Research Councils ICT Conference The UK e-Science Programme David Wallace, Chair, e-Science Steering Committee

RC ICT Conference 17 May 2004 Overview 1.Why a UK e-Science Programme? 2.An Example 3.Relevance to RC ICT Conference 4.A look ahead

RC ICT Conference 17 May Why a UK e-Science Programme?  Increasingly global collaboration  Demands on the scientist to manage data, computation and visualisation – client server model no longer adequate  Exploitation of heterogeneous data sets

RC ICT Conference 17 May … Funding to date First Phase: 2001 –2004  Application Projects –£74M –All areas of science and engineering  Core Programme –£15M Research infrastructure –£40M Collaborative industrial projects Second Phase: 2003 –2006  Application Projects –£96M –All areas of science and engineering  Core Programme –£16M Research Infrastructure –DTI Technology Fund

RC ICT Conference 17 May … current status  An exciting portfolio of Research Council e- Science projects –Beginning to see e-Science infrastructure deliver some early ‘wins’ in several areas –Astronomy, Chemistry, Bioinformatics, Engineering, Environment, Healthcare ….  The UK unique in strong industrial component –Over 60 UK companies contributing over £30M –Engineering, Pharmaceutical, Petrochemical, IT companies, Commerce, Media, …

RC ICT Conference 17 May An example  The Integrative Biology Project: University of Oxford (and others) and the University of Auckland  Models of electrical behaviour of heart cells developed by Denis Noble’s team in Oxford  Mechanical models of beating heart developed by Peter Hunter’s group in Auckland Researchers need to be able to easily build a secure ‘Virtual Organisation’ allowing access to each group’s resources  Will enable researchers to do different science

RC ICT Conference 17 May 2004 The Grid = A set of core middleware services running on top of high performance global networks

RC ICT Conference 17 May Relevance to RC ICT Conference  Evaluation of the UK programme: internationally competitive  Emergence of next generation of web services  Potential for RC centres to play a major role  Role of JISC in roll-out

RC ICT Conference 17 May A look ahead – SR 2004…  Grid Operations Centre, National Grid Service and AAA services  Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute  National e-Science Institute  Digital Curation Centre  International Standards Activity  Needs continued support from Research Councils with identifiable e-Science funding lines post 2006