First phase of the Programme
"e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it."
Dr John Taylor, Director General of Research Councils
In November 2000 the Director General of Research Councils, Dr John Taylor, announced £98 million funding for a new UK e-Science programme. The allocations were £3 million to ESRC, £7 million to NERC, £8 million each to BBSRC and MRC, £17 million to EPSRC and £26 million to PPARC. In addition, £5 million was awarded to CLRC to ‘Grid Enable’ their experimental facilities and £9 million was allocated towards the purchase of a new Teraflop scale HPC system. A sum of £15 million was allocated to a Core e-Science Programme, a cross-Council activity to develop and broker generic technology solutions and generic middleware to enable e-Science and form the basis for new commercial e-business software. The £15 million funding from the OST for the core e-Science Programme has been enhanced by an allocation of a further £20 million from the CII Directorate of the DTI which will be matched by a further £15 million from industry. The Core e-Science Programme will be managed by EPSRC on behalf of all the Research Councils.
The e-Science Programme will be overseen by a Steering Committee chaired by Professor David Wallace, Vice-Chancellor of Loughborough University. Professor Tony Hey, previously Dean of Engineering at the University of Southampton, has been seconded to EPSRC as Director of the e-Science Core Programme.
What is meant by e-Science? In the future, e-Science will refer to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists.
The World Wide Web gave us access to information on Web pages written in html anywhere on the Internet. A much more powerful infrastructure is needed to support e-Science. Besides information stored in Web pages, scientists will need easy access to expensive remote facilities, to computing resources - either as dedicated Teraflop computers or cheap collections of PCs - and to information stored in dedicated databases.
The Grid is an architecture proposed to bring all these issues together and make a reality of such a vision for e-Science. Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, inventors of the Globus approach to the Grid define the Grid as an enabler for Virtual Organisations: ‘An infrastructure that enables flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources.’ It is important to recognise that resource in this context includes computational systems and data storage and specialised experimental facilities.