© University of Reading 2008 www.reading.ac.uk

David Spence

10 April 2023

e-Research:Activities and Needs

e-Research: Activities and Needs 2

Outline

• Methodology

• Current Activities– Subjects– Hardware– Software– Data Sets

• Support and Infrastructure Needs– Priorities survey

• Questions/Discussions

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

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

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e-Research: Activities and Needs

Current Activities: Subjects

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e-Research: Activities and Needs

Current Activities: Hardware

Compute Requirements

Type Number

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

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)

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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

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e-Research: Activities and Needs

Support and Infrastructure Needs (4/5)

• A small (10’s 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...

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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.

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e-Research: Activities and Needs

Priorities Survey: Results

14

<- highest ranked (2 – very useful, 1 – useful, 0 – not useful) lowest ranked ->

e-Research: Activities and Needs

Overall Schools Coverage

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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)

• Steve will talk about our planned response to these needs in his talk

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