e-Science: The
Changing
Landscape
Malcolm Atkinson
16 April 2009
e-Science Institute
Welcome
• Announcements
• Goal for Today
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What is happening to e-Science?
What is working well? Achieving success!
What should we continue to do?
How should we do that?
What challenges will we meet?
Working together (inter)nationally & locally
• Distillation of experience  wisdom
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History - abridged!
• Dennis Noble uses Mercury
• THE London University Computer in 1959
• to demonstrate heart beats as emergent
behaviour
• by simulating two ion channels
• 2 papers in Nature 1960
 read “The Music of Life” by Dennis Noble
• e-Science as a name
and topic 2000-1
Research
drivers
Digital technology advances
infrastructure &
services
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Coordinated by:
Directors’ Forum
& NeSC
e-Science Centres in the UK
Glasgow
Access Grid
Support Centre
Digital Curation Centre
Edinburgh
Lancaster
Newcastle
Belfast
White Rose
Grid
National Centre for
Text Mining
National Institute
for Environmental
e-Science
Manchester
& NW Grid
National Centre
for e-Social
Science
York
Leicester
Leeds
Sheffield
STFC Daresbury
Cambridge
National Grid
Service
Birmingham
STFC Harwell
Oxford
UCL
Cardiff
Bristol
Open Middleware
Infrastructure Institute
Southampton
Reading
LeSC
Many successes
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Many More Successes
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
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And yet more!
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Software Engineering Analogy
• Software projects
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Circa 1980 - Many successes + Many not so good
Unpredictable
Expensive & requiring unrealistic skill base
Hence couldn’t meet scaling requirement
• Developed discipline
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Systematic approaches + promulgation
Theory validated by empirical trials
Tools that embody and support processes
Amortised over large (global) user communities
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What do we need to do
• To scale-up e-Science impact?
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Predictable
Affordable
Effective
Agile
• When people use effective, well-designed
e-Science tools & services
• They will not notice they’re using them
• They will just focus on their research
• How do we get there?
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