The UK is building a central digital hub for all its national infrastructure data—roads, railways, water pipes, power grids, and the people and environments around them. This facility, called NIDMSVF, solves a basic problem: infrastructure data is currently scattered across different organisations, stored in incompatible formats, and often inaccessible to researchers. Without a unified view, engineers and planners cannot model how a power cut might cascade into a water treatment failure, or how a new housing development will strain local transport networks. The project creates a secure, national repository for this data, linked to high-performance computing and simulation tools that can model entire systems together—not just one bridge or one substation, but the whole interconnected web. If successful, this will transform how the UK plans, maintains, and upgrades its infrastructure. Decision-makers could test the effects of flooding on transport, energy, and communications simultaneously before spending money on new projects. The facility sits at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, piggybacking on existing supercomputing and data storage expertise, so it avoids building everything from scratch. The result is a shared resource for universities, government, and businesses—a single place to ask questions about how the country’s hidden systems actually work together.
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The UKCRIC National Infrastructure Database, Modelling, Simulation and Visualisation Facilities (NIDMSVF) will enable a new generation of research that acquires and interprets data on infrastructure and cities, models complex behaviours, visualises results and informs decision making. The National Infrastructure Database (NID) will provide a national secure facility for assembling, hosting and creating datasets on infrastructure assets and networks and the human and natural environments in which they are located. It will provide a secure, scalable and trusted repository for national infrastructure data; and a new platform for analysis of big datasets, including standard simulation test cases. It will become a hub for infrastructure researchers in the UK and for business and government organisation. The national infrastructure Modelling, Simulation and Visualisation Facilities (MSVF) will provide an e-science environment which will represent a step-change in UK capability by (i) linking seamlessly with the national infrastructure database (ii) conveniently accessing high performance computing facilities (iii) enabling coupling of simulation modules to enable system-of-systems simulation and (iv) linking with visualisation facilities to enable scrutiny and communication of complex and high dimensional simulation results. NIDMSVF will be based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, managed by STFC Scientific Computing Department (SCD) and supported by the JASMIN infrastructure team. This will allow the UKCRIC consortium i) to maximally benefit and leverage the significant scientific and technical track record and expertise of STFC in delivering large scale research infrastructure for the UK and international collaborations; ii) to leverage the established delivery records of STFC using capital money to deliver infrastructure assets to government organisations and international science programmes; and iii) to exploit and benefit from mature data, compute, and infrastructure assets that will provide significant added value to NIDMSVF. The development of the central NIDMSVF will be strongly collaborative and multidisciplinary in nature to ensure fruitful interactions and cross-fertilisation co-development activities between UKCRIC university-based and STFC-based teams.
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