e-Infrastructure Programme
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
- SuperJANET 5
- Integrated Information Environment
- Virtual Research Environments
- Digital Repositories
- Core Middleware Infrastructure and Technology Development
- Semantic Grid and Autonomic Computing
- Shared Services
- Support for eResearch
- 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 [1]:
'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, to have:
- Enhanced and consolidated the current technologies
- Established sustainable communities of use
Supporting the vision, the main aims of the e-Infrastructure programme are as follows, to:
- Increase the benefits to, and use of, e-Infrastructure by a wider user base
- Ensure that e-Infrastructure builds on and shares common core services
- 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 4 thematic areas:
- Community engagement and support Focusing on community engagement and support in the broader take up and more effective use of e-Infrastructure
- e-Infrastructure security Creating solutions to issues of grid authentication, authorisation and security; establishing interoperability and consensus between access management regimes
- 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
- 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.
- Broader use of e-Infrastructure within the research community including the sciences, medicine, arts and humanities and social sciences.
- Increased capability, expertise and effective use of e-Infrastructure.
- Enhanced and easier to use security for the UK grid infrastructure and virtual organisations, with fair and consistent policies on accounting and usage.
- Production level software and capabilities for the UK e-Infrastructure through a well-documented grid service running software that is production ready.
- 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.
