The UK e-Science programme

Edinburgh 25 April 2002 In the UK, rather than concentrating on The Grid itself, the broader focus of e-Science has been chosen. The UK e-Science programme develops support for large-scale science through distributed global collaborations. Within thta goals, One focus of the e-science programme is the development of a Grid communication and computational infrastructure to underpin the work of scientists. In the UK vision, the Grid promotes the rapid formation of virtual colaboratories allowing scientists to work together and share resources irrespective of the location of the scientists or the resources they are using.

The vision of e-science is inclusive in nature and seeks to allow those in sophisticated research labs to work together with scientists in the field. When realised, for instance, maintenance engineers will be seamlessly connected to those with access to large-scale simulations, or the salesperson having access to the rest of a virtual organisation.

It is expected that computer science research resulting from the e-science programme will also be relevant to e-Business, e-Commerce, e-Medicine and e-Government. In e-Medicine for instance, research could result in an infrastructure to support large-scale continuous monitoring of medical data via implanted or on-body sensors and wireless transmission to monitoring organisations. This would provide medical researchers with the data required to implement automated early detection and notification of adverse reactions to drugs, the detection of a whole range of problems such as adverse cardiac events, blood chemistry imbalance and so on.

A future Grid will provide a digital fabric to support a broad range of activities and will be open, flexible and heterogeneous in nature. Essentially IT will disappear into the background and those involved in these activities will focus on the work at hand rather than the technology they use.

  • e-Science experimental platform, isolated from the current service facilities
  • Archival repository to share experimental results across the computing community

To develop e-Science, research is needed in areas such as:

  • Developing a Semantic Grid
  • Creating trusted ubiquitous systems
  • Allowing rapid customised assembly of services
  • Realising autonomic computing

    • A future ubiquitous computing infrastructure will be part of our everyday life, the UK e-Science programme and interactions and needs to be informed by a human-centred approach to computing. According to the programme's vision, we need to understand the impact this will have at work, in the home and how it will effect public interaction with services such as government, education and healthcare. Current approaches to commerce, scientific research and entertainment will have to adapt to support mobile users interacting with a ubiquitous infrastructure. There must also be an economic model developed for funding and supporting this infrastructure. This raises a set of challenges for the computing community. The UK want to address this in partnership with other disciplines.

    Ad Emmen

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