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Frictionless sharing: The new normal?Science & Innovation 2015
Photo CC BY-NC-SA Flickr user expressmonorail
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Themes
Frictionless sharing:The new normal?
1. About Jisc2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage– Equipment sharing– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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Themes
Frictionless sharing:The new normal?
1. About Jisc2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage– Equipment sharing– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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About Jisc
About Jisc:› Registered charity championing the use of digital
technologies in research, education and skills
› Range of shared services, advice and support for UK institutions, e.g.– Janet: World leading network, with eduroam global wireless roaming– Cloud brokerage: Making Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds
easier to use– Assent: Log in with your institutional credentials to any service, from
anywhere– Reach: Industrial connectivity to Janet, at speeds up to 10Gbit/s– Safe Share: Supporting sensitive data sharing for research, e.g.
biomedical data
› Working with RCUK and Innovate UK to accelerate innovation
› Just launched: shared data centre, asset sharing initiative
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About Jisc
About Jisc:› Registered charity championing the use of digital
technologies in research, education and skills
› Range of shared services, advice and support for UK institutions, e.g.– Janet: World leading network, with eduroam global wireless roaming– Cloud brokerage: Making Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds
easier to use– Assent: Log in with your institutional credentials to any service, from
anywhere– Reach: Industrial connectivity to Janet, at speeds up to 10Gbit/s– Safe Share: Supporting sensitive data sharing for research, e.g.
biomedical data
› Working with RCUK and Innovate UK to accelerate innovation
› Just launched: shared data centre, asset sharing initiative
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About Jisc » Janet network
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About Jisc » Amazon portal
Amazon cloud portal:› Monthly invoicing - credit cards are
no longer required for payment
› Itemized billing - consolidated across users/departments
› Billing in GBP, not dollars
› Setting of budget limits for individual user accounts or departments
› The retrieval of service usage information within own areas of responsibility
› Volume-discounts through aggregation across multiple educational institutions
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About Jisc » Assent
Assent:› Single, unifying technology that
enables you to effectively manage and control access to a wide range of web and non-web services and applications.
› These include cloud infrastructures, High Performance Computing, Grid Computing and commonly deployed services such as email, file store, remote access and instant messaging
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About Jisc » Reach
Reach:› £4M funding from BIS to work
towards a Janet which is"open and accessible" toindustry
› Provides industry access touniversity e-infrastructurefacilities to facilitate furtherinvestment in science,engineering and technologywith the active participationof business and industry
› Modelled on Innovate UKcompetition process
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About Jisc » Safe Share
Safe Share:› Providing and building services on
encrypted VPN infrastructure between organisations
› Enhanced confidentiality and integrity requirements per ISO27001
› Requirement to move electronic health data securely and support research collaboration
› Working with biomedical researchers at Farr Institute, MRC Medical Bioinformatics initiative, ESRC Administrative Data Centres
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Themes
Frictionless sharing:The new normal?
1. About Jisc2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage– Equipment sharing– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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Case Study » HPC brokerage
HPC brokerage:› Access to £60m of public investment in
supercomputing equipment and expertise– Reduce friction of sharing between institutions & with
industry
– “Pay as you go” model, no upfront capital costs
– Makes HPC accessible to those who could not previously contemplate it
– Standardized terms and conditions including information assurance, intellectual property, termination etc
› HPC is really a test case – could we apply this approach more generally, building on the Brunswick Agreements?
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Case Study » HPC brokerage
James Earl-Fraser,HPC Midlands› EPSRC regional centre of excellence in
High Performance Computing
› Operated by Loughborough Universityand University of Leicester
› Builds on long standing industrialcollaborations, e.g. E.ON, Rolls-Royce
› Offers a wide range of open source andcommercial off-the-shelf software onattractive licensing terms
› Partnering with Jisc to share equipment and expertise
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Case Study » HPC brokerage
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Themes
Frictionless sharing:The new normal?
1. About Jisc2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage– Equipment sharing– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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Case Study » Equipment sharing
Equipment sharing:› Working with EPSRC to create an
“one stop shop” for sharingresearch equipment
› Piloting Kit-Catalogue equipmentdatabase with 10 institutions
› Kit-Catalogue feeds into national equipment.data.ac.uk portal– Sharing details of 10,000 items of high
value equipment, value >£200m
› Newcastle University alone issharing £16m+ of >£20K valueequipment
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Case Study » Equipment sharing
Dr Jacky Pallas,Director of Research Platforms, UCL› 502 items of equipment ‘public’ in our Research
Equipment Catalogue (30% of total)
› 41% of UCL’s research facilities offer services to other academic groups and 29% offer services to industry and gov’t agencies– External academic users 12.4% of activity, 8.4%
income– Industry services 12.1% activity, 9.4% income
› Estimated value of ‘shared’ equipment >£50M
› All data collected annually through TRAC exercise– Reduced admin burden
Photo credit: University College London
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Themes
Frictionless sharing:The new normal?
1. About Jisc2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage– Equipment sharing– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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Case Study » Shared data centre
› £900K investment from HEFCE
› Anchor tenants:– Francis Crick Institute– King’s College London– London School of Economics– Queen Mary University of London– Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute– University College London
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Case Study » Shared data centre
Dr David Fergusson,Head of Scientific Computing,Francis Crick Institute› Challenges of providing shared platforms
for staff from existing institutes– CRUK London Research Institute– National Institute for Medical Research
› Compute and data requirements for 1,250 scientists working in biomed– In a central London building
› Direction of travel towards more and wider collaboration, requirement for controlled sharing of sensitive data
Photo credit: Francis Crick Institute
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Themes
Frictionless sharing:The new normal?
1. About Jisc2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage– Equipment sharing– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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Panel discussion
Dr Jeremy Yates, STFC DiRAC & SKA:› The National e-Infrastructure for research &
innovation– A 60,000 foot view
– Democratisation & Aggiornamento
› Moving to a more cloud-centric view ofscientific computing
› Scientific computing that is not “HPC”
› Changing the culture around ResearchSoftware Engineering
› Making industrial access to facilities the norm
› Inter-disciplinary science – blockers and enablers
Image credit: Courtesy of EPSRC
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Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC-BY
Martin HamiltonFuturist, Jisc, London