UK research computing is currently a patchwork of separate systems—university clusters, national facilities, and regional hubs—that do not easily share data or processing power. This project aims to knit them into a single, seamless national federation. The problem is that researchers across disciplines—from climate modelling to drug discovery—often cannot access the computing power they need because resources are locked inside institutional silos. Building a genuine federation is technically and socially difficult: different communities use different software, have different security policies, and lack shared governance. This Network-Plus will bring together users, providers, and technical experts to map a practical route forward. If successful, the federation would let a materials scientist in Manchester run simulations on a supercomputer in Edinburgh, or a genomics team in Glasgow access data stored in Cambridge, without bureaucratic friction. It would also improve cybersecurity through coordinated policy, make expensive hardware more efficient by pooling demand, and train a larger workforce in high-performance computing. The project does not build new hardware—it builds the community agreements, technical standards, and governance structures needed to make existing resources work as one.
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Large scale computing is a fundamental and necessary part of modern research across all disciplines. Federation of national, regional, and institutional computing resources has the potential to realise significant benefits for users, resource and service providers, and funders. The key benefits federation can deliver are: improved accessibility for users, enhanced data accessibility and sharing, efficient use of deployed resources through pooling and sharing, enhanced sharing of expertise and experience across disciplinary boundaries, enhanced cybersecurity through joined-up operations and policy, enhanced resilience through the distribution of interoperable resources and services a larger community of highly skilled researchers and technical staff entering UK force The diversity of requirements across different communities and existing infrastructure deployments poses real challenges to building a joined-up federation that can realise these benefits. This Network-Plus aims to identify the pathway to deliver these benefits through the building of a broad and diverse community around joined-up large-scale computing and leveraging this to develop strategic roadmaps to achieve a national federated compute service that encompasses both computation and data federation. The roadmaps will be developed based on evidence drawn from diverse communities, domain representatives, and stakeholders, together with resource and service providers. A foundational principle is that the federation will be built primarily through aggregation of both new and existing services and communities, leveraging existing technologies and expertise wherever possible. We organise ourselves around three key pillars: Community Engagement relating to user stories, provider business cases, and co-development of the federation roadmaps, Technology and Architecture relating to the technologies, system architectures, and requirements that define the hardware and software that will create the technical component of the federation, Governance and Policy that relate to how communities will build and regulate their relationships to manage trust, security, and organisation.
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