JISC

Computation has become a key component to many research areas. Provision of mid-level systems, the integration of appropriate applications and collaborative technologies sitting upon leading-edge network technology will enable researchers to fulfil research challenges they otherwise cannot meet.

JISC needs to work with the HEIs, and other agencies to meet these requirements. The aim will be to lever economies of scale to enable HE consortia to share the provision of both small and large-scale shared ICT facilities for institutions to exploit in support of a variety of business functions, including administration, information provision, data storage and research, learning from the HEFCE Shared Services initiative. It would evaluate various models, including centralised provision and distributed provision (e.g. via Grid, CampusGrid, Cloud computing and similar technologies) and the use of virtualisation to provide shared facilities and would also aim to address the Green Agenda.

e- Infrastructure tends to be a generic term to refer, at institutional, national, international levels, to the network/communications infrastructures, the data/storage infrastructures, compute/processing infrastructures, access management infrastructures, and both the technologies and support (social infrastructures) needed for these to interact. e-Infrastructure also tends to include generic services and applications built upon these infrastructures.

The role of JIR is to build and support these generic infrastructures and services. The role of JSR is to support the development specialised research oriented applications and services on top of these infrastructures. The boundary is by definition dynamic both over time (as specialised applications and services may evolve into generic ones or have applications elsewhere) and over communities (a service specific to a particular community could be regarded as infrastructural within that community).

JISC funding, since it is Funding Council funding, is predicated on improving support for researchers through HEIs. Much of this programme is predicated on high to improve the level of support that HEI’s can provide by enabling sharing of resources and expertise. This depends on two social aspects:

• Trust between HEI’s to share resources in what is an increasingly competitive world
• Trust between researchers and their HEI support services – this varies immensely between disciplines and institutions (and indeed over time)

These social constraints should not be disregarded lightly, however, it is difficult to see how any scalable infrastructural support for researchers can be achieved by attempting to provide services direct to researchers particularly within the context of dual funding: JANET, for example, works since the national service is provided to HEI’s and HEI’s provide the end-user support for researchers (et al.). This programme is targeted at enabling improvements in the support HEI’s can offer researchers by identifying and tackling problems at the national level.

This programme also acts as the complement to other concurrent programmes within the e-Research area.