What is e-infrastructure

e-Infrastructure Briefing paper May 2006 What is e-infrastructure? Research is increasingly carried out through distributed regional, national and global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Such collaborations are built upon an infrastructure of grid computing software that can provide researchers with benefits including shared access to large data collections, advanced ICT tools for data analysis, large-scale computing resources, and high-performance visualisation. e-Infrastructure is the term used for the technology and organisations that support research undertaken in this way. It embraces networks, grids, data centres and collaborative environments, and can include supporting operations centres, service registries, single sign-on, certificate authorities, training and helpdesk services. Most importantly, it is the integration of these that defines e-infrastructure. A range of e-infrastructure developments is already maturing: grid computing is now typically used as a basis for the computation and data management required by collaborative research, and JISC investments such as in virtual research environments and Shibboleth are presently being adopted. Concurrently, a new set of common einfrastructure functions are emerging that, in turn, will enable higher level, innovative applications to be developed. The current UK e-infrastructure, funded by JISC, the UK e-Science programme and joint JISC / Research Council UK (RCUK) initiatives, includes: Funded by JISC:  SuperJANET5  Integrated Information Environment  Virtual Research Environments  Digital Repositories  Core Middleware Infrastructure and Technology  Development  Semantic Grid and Autonomic Computing  Shared Services  Support for e-Research Funded by the UK e-Science programme:  Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK  e-Science community projects: for example, Astrogrid, e-Minerals, Geodise, GridPP, myGrid, NDG, RealityGrid e-Infrastructure Briefing paper May 2006 Joint JISC/RCUK initiatives:  Digital Curation Centre  National Grid Service  National Centre for Text Mining Moving into the future, e-infrastructure has the potential to build on the world-class facilities that have 1 already been developed to deliver what Atkinson et al have summarised : “In the future a pervasive digital infrastructure will allow computing facilities to be always available via a heterogeneous range of devices. The infrastructure will seamlessly combine reliable high-performance computing and communication networks and variable lowperformance embedded or portable devices with integrated wireless facilities. This will connect scientists in resource-rich labs to field scientists with limited resources or to remote automated experiments to form a distributed ubiquitous system. The supporting infrastructure will need to be open to all legitimate users, promote heterogeneity and be extremely flexible. Resources will vary in their availability, their certification of quality and their reliability.” What is the e-Infrastructure Programme? The JISC e-Infrastructure Programme builds on work from the JISC Support of Research Committee, the e-Science Core Programme, and the Office of Science and Technology (OST) e-Infrastructure Roadmap initiative. It has also been informed by European and International developments within the Grid and eResearch communities. The vision for the programme follows the initial five-year investment in the UK e-Science infrastructure, which is being developed with other partners to expand the uptake and effective use of the einfrastructure from early adopters and researchers across disciplines. There are two elements to the vision:  To enhance and consolidate the current technologies  To establish sustainable communities of use Supporting the vision, the main aims of the e-Infrastructure Programme are:  To increase the benefits and use of e-infrastructure by creating a wider user base  To ensure that e-infrastructure builds on and shares common core services 1 Atkinson et al, 2004. See: www.semanticgrid.org/docs/Vision.pdf What is the e-Infrastructure Programme? | Page 2 e-Infrastructure Briefing paper May 2006  To explore the ways in which the benefits of the capabilities being developed in grid computing can be transferred to other domains The e-Infrastructure Programme comprises four thematic areas:  Community engagement and support: Focusing on the broader take-up and more effective use of e-infrastructure  e-Infrastructure security: Creating solutions to issues of grid authentication, authorisation and security; establishing nteroperability and consensus between access management regimes  Grid services and tools: Developing production tools and services to broaden the research community take-up of the computational and data grid resources within the National Grid Service  Knowledge organisation and semantic services: Exploring, developing and applying semantic grid technologies, semantics-aware services, protocols for the exchange of metadata, and the use of these to automate the creation of service workflows and virtual organisations What are the benefits for the research community?  The thematic areas of the programme have been selected to develop e-infrastructure in key areas and to deliver the following benefits to the research community:  Broader use of e-infrastructure within the research community including the sciences, medicine, arts and humanities and social sciences  Increased capability, expertise and effective use of e-infrastructure  Enhanced and easier to use security for the UK grid infrastructure and virtual organisations, with fair and consistent policies on accounting and usage  Production level software and capabilities for the UK e-infrastructure through a well-documented grid service running software that is production ready  New ways of retrieving, processing and archiving data, opening up new areas of research and expanding existing ones whilst allowing the results of research to be shared by a broader community How do I find out more? The latest information on the programme, the circulars and key programme events can be found at: www.jisc.ac.uk/capital_einf.html If you would like to contact the team directly, their details are: Matthew Dovey: m.dovey@jisc.ac.uk 07876 445 403 Ann Borda: a.borda@jisc.ac.uk 07956 117 735 James Farnhill: j.farnhill@jisc.ac.uk 07766 442 259 Page 3 | What are the benefits for the research community?