The UK e-Science Program and the Grid

Abstract

The talk describes the £ 120M UK ‘e-Science’ initiative and begins by defining what is meant by the term e-Science. The majority of the £ 120M, some £ 85M, is for the support of large-scale e-Science projects in many areas of science and engineering. The infrastructure needed to support such projects needs to allow sharing of distributed and heterogeneous computational and data resources and support effective collaboration between groups of scientists. Such an infrastructure is commonly referred to as the Grid. The remaining funds, some £ 35M, constitute the e-Science ‘Core Program’ and is intended to encourage the development of robust and generic Grid middleware in collaboration with industry. The key elements of the Core Program will be described including the construction of a UK e-Science Grid. In addition, the talk will include a description of the pilot projects that have so far received funding. These span a range of disciplines from particle physics and astronomy to engineering and healthcare. We conclude with some remarks about the need to develop a data architecture for the Grid that will allow federated access to relational databases as well as flat files.