Article for ‘In Business’
Last revised April 5 2002, Version 1.3, Paul Jeffreys
page 1 of 3

Article for ‘In Business’
Last revised April 5 2002, Version 1.3, Paul Jeffreys
Spectacular advances in both commodity computing power and network bandwidth have encouraged the belief amongst the scientific (and latterly) the business communities around the world that it will be possible to embrace new methods of global collaborative research and enterprise.
Scientists are setting out to create a new information technology, which may have a more profound impact on the way we live our lives than the world-wide web. Everyday devices will be able to use information as freely as electricity - the long term aim is that we will be able to access information as easily as drawing power from a socket. The technology which will do this is the Grid, named after the Power Grid, because information will be viewed as a utility . The Grid will be a secure and flexible infrastructure for sharing geographically distributed computers, storage, data and software amongst dynamic groups of individuals.
Think of it as the “web on steroids”, and think of it being available everywhere.
This technological revolution will not be disruptive. It will evolve from our present web and internet. Initial Grid developments are focusing on some grand science challenges, such as understanding how the human genome determines the functions of our bodies, or how to look at a galaxy through different telescopes (operating at different wavelengths) at once.
These enterprises are characterised by the need to extract information from vast amounts of data distributed around the world – an electronic ‘needle in a haystack’ – and this part of the scientific process is called e-Science. The impact of the Grid on daily life will be more gradual, but eventually more profound.
The University of Oxford is at the forefront of a range of Grid and e-Science developments and has embarked upon a set of exciting projects. A regional e-Science Centre (OeSC), directed by Paul Jeffreys, ( http://e-science.ox.ac.uk/ ) was created in July 2001 following a start-up award of nearly £500,000 from the Government’s e-Science core programme. The
OeSC received a further £1M to fund projects undertaken with industry, where collaborating companies make matching contributions. The resources invested in Oxford are part of the UK’s £120million e-Science programme, and the OeSC is one of eight
University centres set up to pioneer this next generation IT infrastructure.
Many large IT companies are fully committed to the Grid. Irving Wladawsky-Berger from
IBM stated recently “All of our systems will be enabled to work with the Grid, and all of our middleware will integrate with the software”.
OeSC staff provide specialist advice to researchers in Oxford and local universities, to companies, and to other organizations interested in exploiting the power of the Grid. It has been actively engaged with local SMEs to develop Grid projects. One example, eDiamond, in collaboration with a local Oxford-based start-up company Mirada Solutions, will construct a very large federated database of annotated, standardized, digital mammograms to offer best-evidence based diagnosis in breast disease. Our aim is for this to become a world-class resource for the UK breast imaging and epidemiology communities.
Two developments are driving the wider technological revolution. Firstly, soon there will be networked microprocessors in most ordinary devices and the challenge will be to extract information and make it available to those who can use it. Secondly, our businesses are increasingly global and dynamic. The concept of a ‘virtual organisation’, or ‘collaboratory’ has emerged, in which teams scattered around the world, either in a single big company, or from several different companies, collaborate to deliver a specific project after drawing on geographically distributed IT resources. Both developments require the Grid. The Oxford e-
Science Centre will have an increasingly important role as it enables our researchers to gain page 2 of 3

Article for ‘In Business’
Last revised April 5 2002, Version 1.3, Paul Jeffreys access to the best global IT resources and works with local companies to exploit fully the enormous power of the Grid. page 3 of 3