Town Meeting - to discuss the UK Strategy for a Research Computing Ecosystem and the future of e-Science

A remarkable Town Meeting has been held at UCL, at which a draft Strategic Plan for the UK Research Computing Ecosystem was discussed. For years we have been trying to find the best way to build on the successes of the UK e-Science programme.

The timing of the Town Meeting proved to be inspired as in a recent development the Strategic Plan and associated documentation will be considered by David Willetts / BIS and circulated to university Vice Chancellors next Wednesday (13 July).

The Strategic Plan will be crucially important in the development of a coherent framework for the UK’s research computing ecosystem. The draft received strong support from attendees at the Town Meeting.

Steve Butcher (head of HEFCE Shared Services) spoke at the Town Meeting and offered to work with the community to develop the Strategic Plan further.

Please leave comments on the draft Strategic Plan referenced above.

Government Information Assurance Event, 28/29 June 2011

The eleventh Information Assurance event was held in London.

In Autumn 2010 the National Security Strategy identified cyber attacks on national infrastructure among “Tier 1” Security threats. Reflecting the severity of this threat, the UK government plans to spend £650 million over four years on a National Cyber Security Programme (NCSP), to reinforce the nation’s defenses against cyber attack.

Last October the Prime Minister placed cyber security at the top of the national security agenda last. Recognising the importance of Information Assurance in achieving cyber security, the new National Cyber Security Strategy, incorporates the National IA Strategy.

The Government ICT Strategy released earlier this year, is focused specifically on opening up public services and delivering digital by default. The claim made is that the ICT strategy will deliver better public services for less cost through increased openness. But the openness comes with risk, and a safe and trusted environment is essential.

A strong message from all speakers is that the employee is the weakest information security point of the organisation. Education is vital.

New devices are agents of change. Users are becoming empowered in choosing devices and how the devices are used, and this leads to new threats:

Device and data loss

More than half of all users do not lock devices

5-10% of tablets and 15-25% phones lost/stolen each year

Mobile devices predicted to be new malware frontier

Google removed 50 infected Apps from MarketPlace after more than 200k down-loads

User behaviour

Average iPhone has 60 applications downloaded; users more readily download to Smartphones than to laptops.

Greater use of social media

It was stated that there is a serious disconnect between policy and reality and between policy awareness and adherence.

JISC-funded Study of Early Adopters of Cloud Computing and Shared Services

The FEAST report, an overview of the adoption of shared services and cloud computing in universities, which was funded by JISC and has been published recently, is worth a read.

HE has an excellent record in shared services eg purchasing consortia, JANET, UCAS. However many in-house activities are perceived to offer competitive advantage.

The report is aimed and written for VCs, Finance directors etc.

Text copied from the JISC web-page:

Purpose

To conduct a study to identify, explore, document and analyse examples of large-scale shared services and cloud computing implementations for core administrative and related academic systems across universities and colleges in theUK and globally.

To produce models and high quality guidance materials on effective practice around shared services and cloud computing planning and implementation in further and higher education aimed at different stakeholder groups.

Description

This study collated details from more than 250 different projects across the HE sector globally to demonstrate good examples of common frameworks and mutual cooperation, shared services and cloud computing initiatives. 80+ examples relevant to the Further and Higher Education sector (UK or internationally) have been been documented in vignettes and 5 specifically interesting examples have been expanded in to detailed case studies to illustrate the lessons and pitfalls of each project.

HEFCE's Cloud services for education and research – projects and partners announced

HEFCE and JISC have issued a press release giving more details of the UMF funding which was announced last February. It lists the partners involved, including Oxford's projects which will be funded under the programme.

Full text of the release is as follows:

Since announcing a £12.5 million fund in February that aims to help universities and colleges deliver better value for money by working together more effectively, HEFCE and JISC are now able to confirm the projects and partners appointed to deliver the two parts of this work: a national cloud infrastructure and supporting services.

JANET (UK) will deliver the national brokerage to aid procurement of cloud services between higher education institutions and commercial suppliers and Eduserv will provide a pilot cloud infrastructure for higher education institutions. Other partners include De Montfort, Exeter, Edinburgh, Kent, Liverpool John Moores, Oxford, Leicester, Southampton and Sunderland universities (see below).

So that colleges and universities can gain the most benefit from this new cloud-based infrastructure, four new services will be developed to drive its adoption:

• A new specialist team set up by JISC Advance to provide support for procuring and implementing administrative systems and services.
• A shared service to help universities manage the administration of their research operations, from research proposal through to project completion.
• A service to support the secure distribution of graduation documents and transcripts for the benefit of students and prospective employers.
• A service to support libraries in the administration of their electronic resources, which will include the management of their licensing and subscription of electronic journals.

David Sweeney, HEFCE Director – Research, Innovation and Skills, explains the value this suite of work will have once complete, "In the current economic climate all education organisations are looking for further ways to work together, share resources and reduce costs. This programme of work will provide data management and storage services, plus a suite of tools to help universities and colleges, researchers and administrators work more effectively across the research management lifecycle. This will reduce duplication and increase the efficiency of administrative and research processes."

David Utting JISC Director Service Relationships commented, "Cloud-based services have the potential to bring enormous efficiencies and benefits to higher education institutions and we look forward to working with them to realise these. But we acknowledge that it is vital to demonstrate to users the security and robustness of working in an education and research cloud.
"There have been a number of high-profile issues with data being stored in public clouds, which is why we are working with JANET (UK) to deliver a private higher education cloud to ensure universities can trust that their information and data will be secure."

For further information visit here.

1. This £12.5 million is part of the University Modernisation Fund. For further information see ‘Shared services in cloud computing to be funded by HEFCE’

2. Who is involved?
The University of Exeter will lead the Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) work between the universities of Exeter, Kent, and Sunderland to procure, develop and implement a cloud-based research management and administration system based on a need identified by earlier feasibility studies funded by HEFCE.

De Montfort University is developing an enterprise service bus (ESB) solution to demonstrate interoperability between local and cloud systems for shared administrative applications, starting with RMAS.

JISC Collections will manage the electronic resource management support service which builds on work by JISC and the Society of College National and University Libraries (SCONUL).

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) at University of Edinburgh will develop data management tools and training capability. This will support the production and implementation of data management plans for universities and their researchers to preserve data for sharing, re-use and citation.

A consortium led by Liverpool John Moores University will develop the secure document service. (NB - we're part of this consortium)

Four projects will produce software applications which can be delivered as a service from the cloud. They will support researchers with their work and data management. These are:

• Leicester University is providing support for joint NHS and university research teams working with tissue samples and anonymised patient data.

• The University of Oxford is providing a database to a wide range of researchers in the arts, humanities and other disciplines. Oxford will also provide an integrated set of tools to manage data within Life Sciences and other similar research projects. This will make it easier to submit data for longer-term storage in an appropriate standards compliant data repository.

• The University of Southampton is providing electronic lab data management and collaborations tools.

OUCS wins £1.2million for cloud project - VIDaaS[

It was announced today that OUCS has won funding of £1.2million to develop the VIDaaS Project - Virtual Infrastructure with Database as a Service. This Project will provide a local virtual infrastructure (VI) which will interface with a national Higher Education VI - or 'cloud' - to enable the sharing of services across the whole HE sector. As a result there will be substantial cost savings through economies of scale. The virtual infrastructure will host a self-service 'Database as a Service' (DaaS) system which will help improve the efficiency of UK Higher Education research. Members of the team are shown above.

A revised Government IT Strategy was published on Wednesday 30 March 2011.

One quarter of the document (Part 2) is focused on 'Creating a common ICT infrastructure', within which the cloud features strongly as well as 'common technology standards' and 'interoperability enabled by open standards'. There is also a new proposed governance structure (Part 4).

Does any of this have relevance to Higher Education IT Strategy do you think?

Today, JISC's Managed Research Data programme completes, as does our SUDAMIH project.

I attended the UCISA conference last week. The UCISA web site has the conference information and most of the talks have their slides linked as PDFs now. The themes were:

Day One: Know your business
Day Two AM: Know your numbers
Day Two PM: Strive to be trusted/empower the team
Day Three: See over the horizon

Tweeting was rife, you can find an archive of them on twapper keeper and a summary of them on Summarizr (Powered by Eduserv). I found that the tweeting really added value.



As a taster I will mention just one thought provoking talk, Paul Golding, CEO of Wireless Wanders, on current and future trends in mobile.

Mobile is "everyware". 1.2billion mobiles sold annually. >90% of world has mobile access. In 59 countries there are more mobiles than people. 6 trillion text messages sent in a year. Each teenager sends or receives on average 3339 text messages a month. That's about 14 hours.

First internet enabled phone came out in 1999, and since then there's been a convergence of web 2.0 and Internet centric mobile devices with a 100 times increase in processing power.

The fastest growing sector in app store is business applications,especially for tablets. They are not an offshoot of a PC, but a mobile phone. There's an increasing transition from utility to experience. This will lead to escaping the PC ( when current dependence on iTunes goes). Some people may grow up without ever needing a PC, and it will change their experience of computing, especially as data moves more into the cloud. For example, they will not have concept of folder.

Virtual, augmented reality is also a trend to watch, This combines the physical world and the web world. A tipping point for virtual reality will be tablets now they have cameras. There is an increasing number of sophisticated sensors being developed, which will augment the web experience. Small body sensors can already can detect and measure 20 different things. Sensors in your car can already detect tyre pressures. This leads to the concept of the Internet of Things. Everything in our lives will be accessible via the Internet.

The enablers for this are Moore's law, and the every increasing processing power available, small bluetooth devices which will fit in a post-it note, 4G LTE networks and Web technologies. Combine all of this with the power of cloud and sensor grids and a whole new type of application becomes possible.

The right time web is almost here, giving the right information at the right time to the right person.