Three leading universities and a national lab are pooling their computing expertise to build a shared digital toolkit for tackling climate change, archaeology, and biology. The problem is that cutting-edge research in these fields now generates enormous datasets—from climate simulations to DNA sequences—that no single institution can manage or analyse alone. Currently, teams at Oxford, Reading, and Southampton each have their own specialised computing centres, but they work in isolation, limiting the scale and speed of discoveries. This consortium will connect those centres, allowing researchers to share software tools, data-processing methods, and technical staff. The funding will retain key personnel and support the development of lightweight tools that can be adopted quickly by new research communities. If successful, the project will create a regional hub that makes it faster and cheaper to run large-scale climate models, analyse archaeological artefacts from scans, or process biological data. The immediate impact is on research infrastructure itself—the hidden plumbing of science—rather than on everyday life. But better infrastructure means faster progress on problems that do affect the public, such as predicting flood risks or understanding crop diseases.
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This platform grant proposal seeks to gain support for the next five years to continue the developments of the Oxford e-Research Centre, and to create a stronger regional program of activities by building further on existing collaborations between Oxford, Reading and Southampton Universities and the STFC e-Science Centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Each of the three University sites has acted as an e-Science regional centre; each has unique capabilities that are complementary and that will bring benefit to the partner sites. We believe that this is a unique opportunity to bring together three leading research centres, to create an exciting new capability, to allow application teams across the sites and with complementary technical skills to come together in ways which we otherwise could not do. There is potential for substantial added value through the consortium and clear near term and long term benefits for enhancing collaborative e-Research throughout the region. Our aim in the near term is to address shared application areas, Climate, Archaeology, and Quantitative Biology and Chemistry, embedding through light-weight tools and from lessons learned at each site, and to support the steady expansion into new communities. In brief, the Platform grant will allow the existing communities at each of the Universities to be better served, and provide a critical mass of experts capable of widening community adoption in particular through the involvement of the STFC. Lead by Oxford University this consortium will truly be a regional e-Research centre that brings benefits to each of the individual Universities and can underpin a more ambitious regional engagement effort. We believe that this platform grant will allow the continued development of the partner Centres individually, but more importantly will provide the basis for a substantial high profile regional effort.The funding will be used to retain key personnel at the University Centres, to enable new collaborations at the regional level, and to support research and development in new technologies. We aim to keep some flexibility over the period of the grant, using the funds to allow the continuation of activities and leveraging other research support funds. The people funded by this proposal will work directly with application researchers.
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