National e-Science Centre
Glasgow e-Science Hub
Opening: Remarks
NeSC’s Role
Prof. Malcolm Atkinson
Director
www.nesc.ac.uk
17th September 2003
Global Drivers of e-Science
Collaboration
Data Deluge
Digital Technology
Ubiquity
Cost reduction
Performance increase
Consequential Investment
UK e-Science £240 million + 80 companies
EU e-Infrastructure
USA cyberinfrastructure
…
Three-way Alliance
Multi-national, Multi-discipline, Computer-enabled
Consortia, Cultures & Societies
Theory
Models & Simulations
→
Shared Data
Requires Much
Computing Science
Engineering,
Systems, Notations &
Much Innovation Formal Foundation
Experiment &
Advanced Data
Collection
→
Shared Data
Changes Culture,
New Mores,
New Behaviours
→ Process & Trust
New Opportunities, New Results, New Rewards
Global Knowledge Communities
Often Driven by Data: E.g., Astronomy
No. & sizes of data sets as of mid-2002,
grouped by wavelength
• 12 waveband coverage of large
areas of the sky
• Total about 200 TB data
• Doubling every 12 months
• Largest catalogues near 1B objects
Data and images courtesy Alex Szalay, John Hopkins
Foundation for e-Science
e-Science methodologies will rapidly transform
science, engineering, medicine and business
driven by exponential growth (×1000/decade)

enabling a whole-system approach
computers
software
Grid
sensor nets
instruments
Diagram derived from
Ian Foster’s slide
colleagues
Shared data
archives
NeSC in the UK
Globus
Alliance
National
eScience
Centre
HPC(x)
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Newcastle
Belfast
Directors’ Forum
Helped build a community
Engineering Task Force
Grid Support Centre
Architecture Task Force
UK Adoption of OGSA
OGSA Grid Market
Workflow Management
Database Task Force
OGSA-DAI
GGF DAIS-WG
GridNet
e-Storm
Daresbury Lab
Manchester
Cambridge
Hinxton
Oxford
Cardiff
RAL
London
Southampton
www.nesc.ac.uk
Current Activities
e-Science Institute
Visitor Programme
Event Programme
Web Site
NeSC
Core Programme & Research Projects
Setting up training team: eSCP+PPARC+EGEE
Bidding




Digital Curation Centre
Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute
NextGrid
Collaboration with MRC, BBSRC, … bids
Data Access, Integration,
Publication, Annotation and Curation
PGPGrid
AstroGrid
ODD-Genes
BRIDGES
MS.NET Grid
OGSA-DAI
& DAIT
edikt
QCDGrid
ScotGrid
GridPP
FirstDIG
Applications
Super
COSMOS
Advanced
e-Science
GTI
Mobile Code
Repositories
CS Research
Mouse Atlas
Scientific
Data
DCC
Proposal
Linguistic
Corpora
ArkDB
NeSC Mission
To stimulate and sustain the development of
e-Science in the UK, to contribute significantly to its
international development and to ensure that its
techniques are rapidly propagated to commerce and
industry.
To identify and support e-Science projects within and
between institutions in Scotland, and to provide the
appropriate technical infrastructure and support in
order to ensure rapid uptake of e-Science techniques
by Scottish scientists.
To encourage the interaction and bi-directional flow
of ideas between computing science research and
e-Science applications
To develop advances in scientific data curation and
analysis and to be a primary source of top quality
systems and repositories that enable management,
sharing and best use.
Goal
To have influence
What are researchers doing because of us?
What are developers doing because of us?
What is industry doing because of us?
What are educators doing because of us?
What are governments doing because of us?
Thank You
To the University of Glasgow
for its substantial investment in
and commitment to e-Science