UK e-Science Research Articles

Towards a Cyberinfrastructure for Enhanced Scientific Collaboration: Providing its 'Soft' Foundations May Be the Hardest Part

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises to enable more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more coming to be seen as critically dependent upon effective access to, and sharing of digital research data, and of the information tools that facilitate data being structured for efficient storage, search, retrieval, display and higher level analysis. The February 2003 report of the Atkins Committee to the US NSF Directorate of Computer and Information System Engineering urged that funding be provided for a major enhancement of computer and network technologies, thereby creating a cyberinfrastructure whose facilities would support and transform the conduct of scientific and engineering research. The articulation of this programmatic vision reflects a widely shared expectation that solving the technical engineering problems associated with the advanced hardware and software systems of the cyberinfrastructure will yield revolutionary payoffs by empowering individual researchers and increasing the scale, scope and flexibility of collective research enterprises. Animated by much the same vision, the UK e-Science Core Programme has been engaged in developing an array of open standards middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research. This paper, however, argues that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged for these undertakings. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science - and other global collaborative activities supported by the 'cyberinfrastructure '- if it is to be achieved, will more likely be the resultant of a nexus of interrelated social, legal and technical transformations. The socio-institutional elements of a new infrastructure supporting research collaborations - that is to say, its supposedly 'softer' (non-engineering) parts - are every bit as complicated as the hardware and computer software, and, indeed, may prove much harder to devise and implement. The roots of this latter class of challenges facing 'e-Science' lie in the micro- and meso-level incentive structures created by the existing legal and administrative regimes. Although a number of these same conditions and circumstances appear to be equally significant obstacles to commercial provision of Grid services in inter-organizational contexts, the domain of publicly supported scientific collaboration will provide a more hospitable environment in which to experiment with a variety of new approaches to solving these problems. Towards that end, several 'solution modalities' can be proposed that feature a modular contractual approach to the flexible design of research collaboration agreements. The basic principles and the institutional mode of implementation that will be suggested are sufficiently general that they could also be made applicable for fields of information-intensive collaboration in business and finance that must regularly transcend organizational boundaries.

E-Science and its implications.

After a definition of e-science and the Grid, the paper begins with an overview of the technological context of Grid developments. NASA's Information Power Grid is described as an early example of a 'prototype production Grid'. The discussion of e-science and the Grid is then set in the context of the UK e-Science Programme and is illustrated with reference to some UK e-science projects in science, engineering and medicine. The Open Standards approach to Grid middleware adopted by the community in the Global Grid Forum is described and compared with community-based standardization processes used for the Internet, MPI, Linux and the Web. Some implications of the imminent data deluge that will arise from the new generation of e-science experiments in terms of archiving and curation are then considered. The paper concludes with remarks about social and technological issues posed by Grid-enabled 'collaboratories' in both scientific and commercial contexts.

The UK e-Science Core Programme and the Grid

This paper describes the £120M UK ‘e-Science’ ( http://www.research-councils.ac.uk/ and http://www.escience-grid.org.uk) initiative and begins by defining what is meant by the term e-Science. The majority of the £120M, some £75M, is funding large-scale e-Science pilot projects in many areas of science and engineering. The infrastructure needed to support such projects must permit routine sharing of distributed and heterogeneous computational and data resources as well as supporting effective collaboration between groups of scientists. Such an infrastructure is commonly referred to as the Grid. Apart from £10M towards a Teraflop computer, the remaining funds, some £35M, constitute the e-Science ‘Core Programme’. The goal of this Core Programme is to advance the development of robust and generic Grid middleware in collaboration with industry. The key elements of the Core Programme will be outlined including details of a UK e-Science Grid testbed. The pilot e-Science projects that have so far been announced are then briefly described. These projects span a range of disciplines from particle physics and astronomy to engineering and healthcare, and illustrate the breadth of the UK e-Science Programme. In addition to these major e-Science projects, the Core Programme is funding a series of short-term e-Science demonstrators across a number of disciplines as well as projects in network traffic engineering and some international collaborative activities. We conclude with some remarks about the need to develop a data architecture for the Grid that will allow federated access to relational databases as well as flat files.

Unlocking the power of the Grid

The Grid, it is widely agreed, is the next big thing in computing, but a consensus on what exactly it is can be harder to come by. Grid computing implies the idea of accessing computational resources over a network, the Internet, untroubled by low-level concerns about where these resources might be located. Almost inevitably, the US is in the lead, with NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG) providing the world's most credible example of a functioning Grid. The objective of the IPG is to facilitate the interconnection of computing systems across a number of NASA sites, allowing, for example, the multi-site simulation of a whole space shuttle design. The paper discusses the e-Science Programme. The UK e-Science Grid represents a technical challenge, operating across nine separate centres, each with their own IT policies. Each of the centres on the e-Science Grid provides a local knowledge-base of Grid expertise, implementing currently available public-domain Grid middleware, including the Globus Toolkit, and developing a portfolio of industrial projects.