Useful Links

The following list has been compiled to provide easy access to further information about our partner organisations and other organisations with an interest in e-Research and Open Source software.

OMII-UK Sites

OMII-UK is made up of three sites, which are based in Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester.

The Southampton site is based in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at The University of Southampton.

• The University of Southampton is one of the top 10 research universities in the UK and has achieved consistently high scores for its teaching and learning activities. ECS is one of the world’s largest and most successful integrated departments of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The Edinburgh site is based in the EPCC at The University of Edinburgh.

• The University of Edinburgh is the top Ranked Scottish University, one of the top 10 Universities in Europe, and one of the top 30 in the world. The EPCC is a leading European centre of expertise in advanced research, technology transfer and the provision of supercomputer services to Universities.

The Manchester site is based in the School of Computer Science at The University of Manchester.

• The University of Manchester is Britain's largest single-site university with a proud history of achievement and an ambitious agenda for the future. The School of Computer Science is the longest established school of Computer Science in the UK, and one of the largest, which is ranked among the top ten UK universities for Computer Science and IT.

Funding bodies

OMII-UK is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the UK e-Science Core programme.

Some aspects of OMII-UK are funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Partner Organisations

OMII-UK works with a number of organisations to ensure optimum development, uptake and support for our software.

The National Grid Service is one of the largest e-Infrastructure providers in the UK, It provides UK researchers with coherent electronic access to all computational and data based resources and facilities required to carry out their research, independent of resource or researcher location.

The National e-Science Centre (NeSc) stimulates and sustains the development of e-Science in the UK, contribute significantly to its international development and ensure that its techniques are rapidly propagated to commerce and industry.

OMII-Europe is an EU-funded project that sources key software components which can interoperate across several heterogeneous Grid middleware platforms.

Commissioned Software Projects

OMII-UK identifies gaps in the software requirements of UK researchers and commissions developers to provide the necessary software. A list of OMII-UK Commissioned Software Projects is provided on the Commissioned Software Projects page.

e-Research and Open Source Groups

A number of organisations work to help the e-Research and Open Source community. The following links provide further information of these organisations.

The ESRC National Centre for e-social science (NCeSS) investigates how innovative and powerful computer-based infrastructure and tools developed through the e-science programme can benefit the social science research community. Additionally, it promotes the uptake of e-infrastructure by providing e-social science training, technical support, information services and support to users.

The open source software advisory service (OSS Watch) provides unbiased advice and guidance on the use of free and open source software and licences. OSS Watch is funded by the JISC and its services are available free-of-charge to UK higher and further education. If you want to find out more about open source software, they are the people to ask.

Regional e-Science Centres

One of the goals of the UK e-Science Core Programme was the creation of a National e-Science Centre linked to a network of regional e-Science Centres. The regional centres provide physical resources and information for applications development. Taken together the centres provide a national resource in computing, virtual reality technology, data storage and other key aspects of distributed research.

The Belfast e-Science Centre's emphasis is middleware based on the Globus standard, and the promotion of the national StarterKit.

The Cambridge e-Science Centre enables new scientific advances by using Grid-enabled applications to tackle Terascale problems. It also develops new generic Grid-based tools for massive data handling, high-performance computing and visualisation applications on wide area networks.

The CLRC e-Science Centre spearheads the exploitation of e-Science technologies throughout the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s programmes, the research communities they support and the national science and engineering base.

The London e-Science Centre supports the development of e-Science activities through collaborations with applied scientists in the fields of Materials Modelling, Particle Physics, Bioinformatics, Environmental Modelling, and Engineering.

The North East e-Science Centre develops specialist expertise in database-intensive computing on the Grid.

The North West e-Science Centre ensures that e-Science is used and implemented in cross-disciplinary collaborations with computer science expertise applied to complex problems in biosciences, medical science, engineering, physical sciences and social sciences.

The Oxford e-Science Centre focuses on bioinformatics and medical imaging with strong support from physics.

The Southampton e-Science Centre's primary focus is on problems in the engineering domain. It has also established very close relationships with a broad range of disciplines, institutions, and industrial partners.

The Welsh e-Science Centre will pursue research in data and knowledge management and interoperation of heterogeneous distributed information resources, problem-solving environments for scientific and engineering applications and distributed visualization for immersive and collaborative applications.