New consortium to embed e-Research technology

by Simon Hettrick, OMII-UK.

Back to index page

Previous article: ONIX a free online cancer-research portal

‘In the last twelve months, people have begun to think differently about e-Research technology’ says Anne Trefethen, Director of e-Research South, ‘maybe it’s the recession causing people to make more of the resources available to them, or maybe we’re starting to see the benefits of [e-Research] technology maturing’. Whatever the reason, e-Research South are experiencing significant interest in their mission to embed e-Research technologies in the research community.

The e-Research South consortium was formed in October last year from groups based at the STFC and the universities of Oxford, Reading and Southampton. Each of the groups has developed specialist expertise in a different area of e-Research, and has been very successful in its own right. By bringing the groups together, e-Research South has created a consortium with the skills needed to apply innovative computing technology to problems experienced by research projects from a broad range of disciplines – from musicology to medicine.

Understanding the requirements of projects from such a diverse range of disciplines can be challenging. The solution used by e-Research South is to embed developers. An embedded developer spends time working as a member of the project, learning about their research and the technology they require. This leads to a comprehensive understanding of the project’s requirements, and an e-Research solution that matches the project’s needs.

One of the challenges for e-Research has been a lack of understanding of the (admittedly, very new) technology in the wider research community. However, the success of e-Research South seems to indicate that this challenge is being met. ‘We’re succeeding in both reaching new audiences and in deeper engagement with researchers across a variety of disciplines’ describes Anne ‘we now have people knocking at our door who wouldn’t have done so only twelve to eighteen months ago… it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the interest’.

www.eresearchsouth.ac.uk

Smart Labs

Smart Labs covers a number of projects that are using new technology to improve the recording of information generated by researchers, and to automatically capture information about the laboratory environment and equipment.

The CombeChem and e-Bank projects have already made a huge impact on the worldwide crystallography community (the initial demonstrator area) and the dissemination of data. Smart Labs will develop the work of these two projects, and implement it in new projects starting at the universities of Oxford and Reading, and at the STFC.

NeuroHub

The NeuroHub project will help neuroscientists to conduct more productive research. A set of tools will be developed that will allow neuroscientists to construct their own environment for research information. This will be tailored to their needs, and presented through a web 2.0 access layer or a local application.

The framework and tools developed by e-Research South will be the product of in-depth analysis of user requirements, adaptation of existing software, development of key missing components and a tight collaboration between neuroscientists, technologists and resource providers at the universities of Oxford, Reading and Southampton.

Water resource modelling

Ensembles of hydrological models will be used to determine how the availability of water resources will change in the future. The ensembles are based on multiple scenarios of future hydrological conditions, and require significant computing power to model. The Reading Campus Grid has been used to help reduce computation time from 21 days to 9 hours.

At its heart, this project seeks a solution to a common problem with Climate modelling on Grids: different models predict different outcomes. Once headway has been made on this problem, the project intends to implement their solution with other climate-modelling projects.