10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Computing at CLRC Keith G Jeffery Acting Director, Information Technology

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 CLRC The Central Laboratory for the Research Councils has three laboratories –Rutherford Appleton Laboratory –Daresbury Laboratory –Chilbolton and has a mission: –support R&D in science and engineering –technology transfer and wealth creation –public understanding of science

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 What do we do? Space-based - both astronomy and earth observation satellites Materials - synchrotron radiation source at DL and neutron source at RAL - materials High-powered Lasers for fusion and investigations Microstructure fabrication and electronics Particle Physics Computing

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 How does computing feature? Computing infrastructure for the whole of CLRC Scientific computing for each area of R&D Computing for external customers both from Research Council (academic sector) and commerce / industry Computing for the CLRC business procedures Information Systems - R&D, production systems Computational Science -R&D, production systems

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Computing infrastructure for the whole of CLRC NT / Microsoft Strategy for the desktop, centralised management and application delivery and calendar based on MS Exchange and Outlook (associated Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access). Intranet - WWW - Dataweb Networks - departmental networks with FDDI backbone around the site

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Scientific computing for each area of research ‘Big Science’ done at CLRC –is always part of national and international collaborations. –impose conflicting computing standards so we have examples of almost every manufacturer and operating system Examples –Unix in Astronomy (Starlink talk at HEPiX) –Unix and NT for Particle Physics (RAL Site Report) –VMS on ISIS –NT and Unix for Computing Science –Supercomputers for Computational Science

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Computing for the lab’s business procedures what we do now –central transaction processing systems for finance, personnel, assets (with specialised client software) for administration staff –decision support systems for project managers via web forms and dataweb on intranet –paper-based input / update project managers ==> administration what we plan to do –revise processes to all electronic

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Computing Services for Customers Computer systems, operations, help desk support of applications packages and software suites advice and assistance community clubs joint R&D work

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Information Systems W3C Office at RAL Advanced Database-based Information Systems - Dataweb and metadata Multimedia and Hypermedia Knowledge based systems Business process, dataflow, cooperative working Virtual Reality, Visualisation and Graphics

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Computational Science Mathematical Algorithms sparse matrices optimisation theory computational modelling in chemistry, biology, materials, and engineering

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 Computing at CLRC : Organisation DCI (formed by various mergers of previous departments): March split: CSE: –Computational Science -R&D, production systems ITD –Computing infrastructure for the whole of CLRC –Scientific computing for each area of R&D –Computing for external customers both from Research Council (academic sector) and commerce / industry –Computing for the CLRC business procedures –Information Systems - R&D, production systems

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 How will computing develop at CLRC? Information Systems –CLRC Business Procedure effectiveness and efficiency –Information Systems R&D WWW & Hypermedia Database and metadata Knowledge based systems –VR and Visualisation Centre –Supercomputing - commodity-based, ASCI systems, distributed shared memory

10 April © Keith G Jeffery HEPiX April 1999 How will computing develop at CLRC? Customer Service: Particle Physics –greatly increasing demands for cpu, disk, tape. –Regional Centre model for future experiments We want to listen and discuss