ESNW : A Centre for Collaborative Multidisciplinary e-Research in the North West

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This proposal is to build a centre for collaborative multidisciplinary research building on the existing successes of e-Science North-West (ESNW). ESNW was established to provide support for Grid and e-Science activities in the region and to provide effort in building a UK National Grid. ESNW also has a strong specialism in bio-medical e-Science. We have succeeded in gaining substantial additional funding from the University and the North-West region and are now seeking further funding to provide a transition to a sustainable centre that will be a permanent part of the national and international e-Science activities in the UK. We are also intending to use the funding to promote knowledge transfer from our current portfolio of projects to new projects in new application areas and disciplines. We are establishing a Virtual Campus at the University linking researchers to tools and infrastructure for solving problems at the frontiers of research. The sheer volume and range of formats for research data and the need for massive computing power for simulation and data analysis are the identifying areas of e-Science so our proposal invests heavily in effort for robust software engineering.We also wish to play a key role in technology transfer of e-Science techniques to industry and other stakeholders in the North-West. Consequently our proposal includes the activities of a business manager to provide this liaison, arrange seminars, workshops and demonstrations of technology. We will utilise our world-class expertise in Access Grid both to diffuse our courses and seminars more widely and to make available other courses and seminars given by international partners. Our participation in the World Universities Network will be leveraged here. Our bio-medical e-Science will grow, and ESNW will be responsible for extracting commonality of Grid middleware and techniques from these projects and liaising with organisations such as the UK Open Middleware Infrastructure Initiative to make these robust and widely available. Thus we will augment the UK Grid middleware stack. We liaise closely with the UK Grid Operations Support Centre and provide effort and consultancy as part of this national support effort. We are founding members of North-West Grid and will use our contacts and projects to ensure that this is productively used to grow the knowledge economy in the North-West.