Announcement of e-Science Pilot Projects
In their Spending Review Settlement (SR 2000) the Government announced they would be investing £120 million in a new initiative in e-Science.
As part of this, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council was allocated £17 million to set up projects aimed at testing "grid" technology in a number of distinct science and engineering areas, in collaboration with industry and commerce. The concept of "grid computing" is based upon an analogy with the electricity grid where electricity is easily and uniformly available at the point of use, but where the complexities of generation and transmission of power are hidden from the user.
Following a call for proposals, EPSRC has now agreed how its £17 million should be allocated, among six successful projects. These pilot projects will be led by the Universities of York, Southampton, Manchester, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, and, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London. The projects all involve collaborations with other Universities. In addition, a number of companies are involved in the research and are contributing a further £8 million in cash and in-kind.
This initiative has been described by Dr John Taylor, Director General of the Research Councils, as "global collaboration in key areas of science, and the next generation of computing infrastructure that will enable it".
A significant challenge in most scientific areas is the massive increase in the amount of data now available and used by researchers. In order to process, analyse and store this information new computing hardware and software needs to be developed; this is at the heart of e-Science. This research will also benefit business, commerce and education in the longer term.
Notes for Editors:
The research councils involved in the e-Science initiative are EPSRC, BBSRC, CLRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC and PPARC. The Department of Trade and Industry is also contributing £20 million towards the research council activities and a core e-Science Programme which is being operated by EPSRC, on behalf of all research councils, within an additional allocation of £15 million. This core Programme is headed up by Professor Tony Hey.
The six EPSRC funded projects are:
1. DISTRIBUTED AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE ENVIRONMENT (DAME)
Principal Investigator: Professor Jim Austin, Department of Computer Science, University of York
Other collaborating universities: Oxford (Electrical and Electronic), Sheffield (Automatic Control and Systems Engineering), Leeds Mechanical Engineering, Computing)
Collaborating companies: Rolls Royce plc, Data Systems and Solutions. Further companies are expected to join the project.
Objectives: The project aims to build a Grid test-bed for distributed diagnostics. The application demonstrator will initially be a distributed environment for the maintenance of civil aircraft engines. The technology is, however, also applicable to other sectors such as medical, pharmaceutical, transport and manufacturing .The project will capitalise on experience of data grids in the USA and will address performance issues such as large-scale data management. The essential research theme of the work is real-time intelligent feature extraction, intelligent data mining and decision support tools which are distributed on a global basis. The scale of the data generated by the 100,000 aircraft engines in flight, the size of the data bases needed to handle the information and the need for distributed access to these data make it a particularly demanding challenge for grid technologies. The Universities already collaborate through the White Rose Computational Grid currently under construction at a cost of £2.8 Million to York, Sheffield and Leeds universities.
Contact point: Jim Austin
2. STRUCTURE-PROPERTY MAPPING: COMBINATORIAL CHEMISTRY AND THE GRID
Principal Investigator: Dr Jeremy Frey, Department of Chemistry, University of Southampton
Other collaborating universities: Bristol (Chemistry); Departments of Electronics and Computer Science, Mathematics within Southampton University
Collaborating companies: Roche Discovery Welwyn, Pfizer, IBM UK Ltd, Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, Southampton Combinatorial Centre of Excellence
The goal of the project is to develop an e-Science test-bed that integrates existing structure and property data sources, and augments them within a grid-based information and knowledge environment. The synthesis of new chemical compounds by combinatorial methods provides major opportunities for the generation of large volumes of new chemical knowledge and is the principal drive behind the project. An extensive range of primary data needs to be accumulated, integrated and relationships modeled, so that maximum knowledge can be derived. The service-based grid computing infrastructure extends to devices in the laboratory and involves enriched systems, (including multimedia and live metadata), full support for provenance and innovative techniques for automation throughout the environment. The results of the project will impact on the design of materials through the prediction of properties and the identification of suitable compounds in a variety of applications.
Contact point : Jeremy Frey
3. THE REALITY GRID – A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATING CONDENSED MATTER AND MATERIALS
Principal Investigator: Professor Peter Coveney, Department of Chemistry, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London
Other collaborating universities: Edinburgh (Physics and Astronomy), Manchester Computing Centre, Imperial College, London (Computer Science), Loughborough University (Computer Science), Oxford (Materials), Manchester (Computer Science)
Collaborating companies: CfS Consortium, Schlumberger Cambridge Research Ltd, Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research, Silicon Graphics Inc, Advanced Visual Systems Ltd, FECIT
The project aims to enable the realistic modeling of complex condensed matter structures at the meso and nano-scale levels and for the discovery of new materials. The project has immediate extensions into e-Bioscience and e-Climate. The Reality Grid extends the concept of a virtual reality center across the grid and links it to massive computational resources at HPC centers and experimental facilities. Using grid technology to closely couple high throughput experimentation and visualisation, the Reality Grid will move the bottleneck out of the hardware and back to the human mind. A two-track approach will be used. A "fast track" to use currently available grid middleware to construct a working grid, and a "deep track" which involves computer science teams in harnessing leading-edge research to create a robust and flexible problem-solving environment in which to embed the Reality Grid.
Contact point: Peter Coveney
4. GRID ENABLED OPTIMISATION AND DESIGN SEARCH FOR ENGINEERING (GEODISE)
Principal Investigator: Dr Simon Cox, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
Other universities: Oxford (Computing Laboratory), Manchester (Computer Science)
Collaborating companies: Rolls Royce plc, BAE Systems plc, Fluent Europe Ltd, Intel Corp (UK) Ltd, Microsoft Ltd, Epistemics Ltd, Compusys plc
Engineering design search and optimisation is the process whereby engineering modeling and analysis are exploited to yield improved designs. In the next 2-5 years, intelligent search tools will become a vital component of all engineering design systems and will steer the user through the process of setting up, executing and post-processing design search and optimisation activities. Whilst the evaluation of a single design may require the analysis of gigabytes of data, to improve the process of design can require assimilation of terabytes of distributed data. Achieving the latter will lead to the development of intelligent search tools. GEODISE will provide grid-based seamless access to an intelligent knowledge repository, a state of the art collection of optimisation and search tools, industrial strength and analysis codes, and distributed computing and data resources. This will involve large-scale distributed simulations to be coupled with tools to describe and modify designs, often in real time, using information from a knowledge base. Such tools will be physically distributed and under control of multiple elements in the design supply chain. The initial industrial application for the project will be on the use of computational fluid dynamics.
Contact point : Simon Cox
5. DISCOVERY NET: AN E-SCIENCE TEST-BED FOR HIGH THROUGHPUT INFORMATICS
Principal Investigator: Dr Yike Guo, Department of Computing, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London
Collaborating Departments within Imperial College; Bioengineering and Physics, Bichemistry, Electrical Engineering, Huxley School of Environment
Collaborating companies: Inforsense Ltd, Deltadot Ltd, Rvco Inc
The Discovery Net project aims to design, develop, and implement an advanced computing infrastructure to support real-time processing, interpretation, integration, visualisation and mining of massive amounts of time-critical data generated by high throughput devices. The project will encompass new technology devices including biochips in biology, high throughput screening technology in biochemistry and combinatorial chemistry, high throughput sensors in energy and environmental science, remote sensing and geology. Application areas will include, analysis of protein folding chips and SNP chips using LFII technology, protein-based fluorescent micro array data, air sensing data, renewable energy data and geohazard prediction data. The development programme within the project will focus on the design and implementation of the grid infrastructure, data engineering, information structuring and knowledge discovery. Each of these components will provide mechanisms to deal with high throughput informatics. As well as delivering a practical distributed discovery platform, the project will include the establishment of a set of standards for representing and communicating high throughput information for integrated research. Such standards will be promoted through dissemination and collaboration with related global distributed data research programmes.
Contact point: Yike Guo
6. MYGRID: DIRECTLY SUPPORTING THE E-SCIENTIST
Principal Investigator: Professor Carole Goble, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester
Other collaborating universities: University of Newcastle (Computer Science), University of Nottingham (Computer Science and IT), University of Sheffield (Computer Science), European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Collaborating companies: IBM UK Ltd, GlaxoSmithKline, SUN Microsystems Ltd, AstraZeneca UK Ltd, Merck KgaA, Epistemics Ltd, Network Inference, geneticXchange
To date, Grid development has focused on the basic issues of storage, computation and resource management needed to make a global scientific community’s information and tools available in a high performance environment. However, from an e-Science viewpoint, the purpose of the Grid is to deliver a collaborative and supportive environment that allows geographically distributed scientists to achieve research goals more effectively. The Mygrid project will design, develop and demonstrate higher-level functionalities over an existing Grid infrastructure that supports scientists making use of complex distributed resources. The project will develop a "workbench" that supports: (i) the scientific process of experimental investigation, evidence accumulation and result assimilation; (ii) the scientist’s use of the community’s information; and, (iii) scientific collaboration, allowing dynamic groupings to tackle emergent research problems. The workbench will provide to the scientist personalisation facilities relating to resource selection, data management and process enactment. The design and development activity will be informed by and evaluated using problems in bioinformatics, which is characterised by a highly distributed community, with many shared tool resources. Mygrid will develop two application environments, one that supports individual scientists in the analysis of functional genomic data, and another that supports the annotation of a pattern database. Both of these tasks require explicit representation of scientific processes, and have challenging performance requirements.
Contact point: Carole Goble
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the largest of the United Kingdom’s seven government-funded research councils. Its mission is to support the highest quality research and related postgraduate training in engineering and the physical sciences. EPSRC aims to advance knowledge and technology and to provide trained engineers and scientists for the benefit of the United Kingdom and the quality of life of its citizens. It has the further role of promoting public awareness of engineering and the physical sciences. Website address for more information : http://www.epsrc.ac.uk
For further information contact: Vince Osgood, EPSRC Programme Manager IT & CS Programme, tel: 01793 444394 or email: Vince Osgood or Jane Reck, EPSRC Press Officer, tel: 01793 444312 or email: Jane Reck