1. © University of Reading 2008 www.reading.ac.uk David Spence 20 April 2014 e-Research: Activities and Needs

2. e-Research: Activities and Needs2 Outline Methodology Current Activities – Subjects – Hardware – Software – Data Sets Support and Infrastructure Needs – Priorities survey Questions/Discussions

3. e-Research: Activities and Needs Methodology (1/2) Informal Interviews – Start with usual suspects – Gradually widening to encompass all schools Web survey – Sent to e-Science list, Heads of School School Heads of Research Scope – Started with core e-Research – Extended to get an overview of all research ICT Final requirements ranking survey 3

4. e-Research: Activities and Needs Methodology (2/2) 75 Researchers and 11 support staff 16 out of 17 schools doing research covered so far Qualitative Still a work in progress – Main body of work finished July – On going Most results here are from the first round interviews/survey 4

5. e-Research: Activities and Needs Current Activities: Subjects 5

6. e-Research: Activities and Needs Current Activities: Hardware Compute Requirements TypeNumber High Throughput (Campus Grid) 12 Local Cluster (2-20 node) 11 High Performance (20+ Node) 4 Supercomputing 10 Local Computers We heard about 20 significant computational resources across the University Research ICT is still predominantly on the desktop 6

7. e-Research: Activities and Needs Current Activities: Software Summary 11 Programming languages 14 Maths or Stats packages 24+ Other packages Most packages were only mentioned once or twice Significant Results 22 people are developing their own code – 11 mentioned Matlab – 8 mentioned Fortran 2/3 of people use UNIX (e.g. Linux or Mac OS) 7

8. e-Research: Activities and Needs Current Activities: Data Sets 24 academically significant data sets Size – 10 would fit on a hard drive – 14 are larger Type – 10 sets were external sets used for input to computation – 14 were produced by the researcher(s) 8

9. e-Research: Activities and Needs Support and Infrastructure Needs (1/5) An occasional forum for presenting local e-Research projects and infrastructure developments. A system for introducing less computational users to experienced e-Researchers for support in writing research proposal and collaboration. Advice about choosing which compute resources/hardware/software/data storage/services/web servers to use. 9

10. e-Research: Activities and Needs Support and Infrastructure Needs (2/5) A central license for Matlab (which would require a contribution but will be cheaper than your own license). A ready-to-use system for using Matlab (and other mathematical packages) on the Campus Computational Grid. 10

11. e-Research: Activities and Needs Support and Infrastructure Needs (3/5) University provided training and documentation in: – Basic UNIX/Linux – UNIX/Linux Administration – Campus Grid – Data Stewardship – Writing e-Research grant proposals – Programming 11

12. e-Research: Activities and Needs Support and Infrastructure Needs (4/5) A small (10s of nodes) central University cluster. An expanded Campus Grid (Linux access to 500 PCs in library/labs when not in use by students) with more memory, local disk and check-pointing. A simplified method for accessing the Campus Grid. More information about the ACET Supercomputer: pricing, software, hardware type... 12

13. e-Research: Activities and Needs Support and Infrastructure Needs (5/5) Locally provided web-server capacity for providing access to non-static data (e.g. searchable databases). Help with providing for the persistence of data/collections collected in research projects. An online collaboration platform for Research, available outside the University, like Blackboard or Subversion/TRAC. 13

14. e-Research: Activities and Needs Priorities Survey: Results 14

15. e-Research: Activities and Needs Overall Schools Coverage 15

16. e-Research: Activities and Needs Questions/Discussion We are especially interested in how relevant the Support and Infrastructure Needs highlighted are to you. – I have paper versions of the follow-up survey for those who have not yet voted – Take a copy for your colleagues or point them to http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/its/escience/its-eresearch- follow-up.asp (linked from http://www.reading.ac.uk/e- research) http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/its/escience/its-eresearch- follow-up.asphttp://www.reading.ac.uk/e- research Steve will talk about our planned response to these needs in his talk 16