The UK e-Science Programme has won a prestigious international award in the inaugural GRIDtoday Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards which are presented at the GridWorld conference in Washington DC today.
A panel of international leaders in grid and service-orientated IT voted UK e-Science the "research organisation demonstrating the most innovative grid implementation in government research". The panel comprised contributors and editors of GRIDtoday, the weekly online publication covering developments in grid computing and service-orientated IT.
Malcolm Atkinson, UK e-Science Envoy from the National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh says: "The UK e-Science Programme is delighted to receive this recognition for its innovative research, especially from such an influential community in the grid world. Since its start in 2001, the UK e-Science Programme has invested more than $450 million on grid R&D and deployment alone. Now we have a National Grid Service and users from virtually every research discipline."
The GridWorld conference, which runs from 11-15 September, is featuring several leading developments from the UK e-Science Programme including: Open Source software from OMII-UK (Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute); data access and integration software developed in Edinburgh; a session to explore pooling of educational and training material in grid computing; and a session on the UK's Knowledge Transfer Network, Grid Computing Now!.
The GRIDtoday Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards are determined through a survey of thousands of GRIDtoday readers, and will be a permanent annual feature of the publication. The UK e-Science Programme has won an Editors' Choice Award.
"We are very excited about this opportunity to articulate the views and opinions of our readers to recognize the accomplishments that are being made in advancing the development and adoption of grid, service-oriented IT and virtualisation," said Tom Tabor, publisher of GRIDtoday. "These industry recognition awards send a strong message to the recipients that the many global contributors working in or watching this important computing segment recognise their work, and consider their efforts meritorious. Our congratulations go out to all the winners."
More information on these awards can be found at www.GRIDtoday.com
More information on the UK e-Science Programme can be found at www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience and www.nesc.ac.uk
Contacts:
Malcolm Atkinson, e-mail: mpa@nesc.ac.uk tel. +44 (0)131 651 4040
Notes for editors
- e-Science refers to the science that can be done when researchers have access to resources held on widely-dispersed computers as though they were on their own desktops. The resources include very large digital data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation.
- A computing grid allows these different resources to work together seamlessly across networks, enabling people to share resources and form virtual organizations. The vision is to facilitate collaborative working by making computing power as easy to access over the grid as electricity is over the power grid.
- The UK e-Science Programme is a coordinated initiative involving all the Research Councils and the Department of Trade and Industry. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council manages the e-Science Core Programme, which is developing generic technologies, on behalf of all the Research Councils and the research communities they support.
- The UK e-Science Programme as a whole is fostering the development of IT and grid technologies to enable new ways of doing faster, better or different research, with the aim of establishing a sustainable, national e-infrastructure for research and innovation which meets the aims of the government's Investment Framework for Science and Innovation 2004-2014. e-Science and the e-infrastructure are thus contributing to the economic success of the UK.
- Further information at www.rcuk.ac.uk/escience and the individual research councils.
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) www.ahrc.ac.uk
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) www.bbsrc.ac.uk
- Council for the Central Laboratory for the Research Councils (CCLRC) www.cclrc.ac.uk
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) www.esrc.ac.uk
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) www.epsrc.ac.uk
- Medical Research Council (MRC) www.mrc.ac.uk
- Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) www.nerc.ac.uk
- Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) www.pparc.ac.uk
- The National e-Science Centre (NeSC) delivers national services for the UK e-Science programme. NeSC runs national and international meetings and workshops for the e-Science development community, including the annual UK e-Science All Hands Meeting. Through the GridNet programme, NeSC provides funds for UK researchers to participate in standardisation efforts such as GGF and OASIS. NeSC is the first affiliate member of the National Grid Service (NGS) and is one node of the NGS Grid Operations and Support Centre. www.nesc.ac.uk