© University of Reading 2008 David Spence 20 April 2014 e-Research: Activities and Needs.
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Transcript of © University of Reading 2008 David Spence 20 April 2014 e-Research: Activities and Needs.
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© University of Reading 2008 www.reading.ac.uk
David Spence
10 April 2023
e-Research:Activities and Needs
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e-Research: Activities and Needs 2
Outline
• Methodology
• Current Activities– Subjects– Hardware– Software– Data Sets
• Support and Infrastructure Needs– Priorities survey
• Questions/Discussions
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Methodology (1/2)
• Informal Interviews – Start with “usual suspects”– Gradually widening to encompass all schools
• Web survey– Sent to e-Science list, Heads of School
• School Heads of Research
• Scope– Started with core e-Research– Extended to get an overview of all research ICT
• Final requirements ranking survey
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Methodology (2/2)
• 75 Researchers and 11 support staff
• 16 out of 17 schools doing research covered so far
• Qualitative
• Still a work in progress – Main body of work finished July– On going
• Most results here are from the first round interviews/survey
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Current Activities: Subjects
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Current Activities: Hardware
Compute Requirements
Type Number
High Throughput (Campus Grid)
12
Local Cluster (2-20 node) 11
High Performance (20+ Node)
4
Supercomputing 10
Local Computers
• We heard about 20 significant computational resources across the University
• Research ICT is still predominantly on the desktop
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Current Activities: Software
Summary
• 11 Programming languages
• 14 Maths or Stats packages
• 24+ Other packages
• Most packages were only mentioned once or twice
Significant Results
• 22 people are developing their own “code”– 11 mentioned Matlab– 8 mentioned Fortran
• 2/3 of people use UNIX (e.g. Linux or Mac OS)
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Current Activities: Data Sets
• 24 academically significant data sets
• Size– 10 would fit on a hard drive– 14 are larger
• Type– 10 sets were external sets used for input to
computation– 14 were produced by the researcher(s)
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Support and Infrastructure Needs (1/5)
• An occasional forum for presenting local e-Research projects and infrastructure developments.
• A system for introducing less computational users to experienced e-Researchers for support in writing research proposal and collaboration.
• Advice about choosing which compute resources/hardware/software/data storage/services/web servers to use.
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Support and Infrastructure Needs (2/5)
• A central license for Matlab (which would require a contribution but will be cheaper than your own license).
• A ready-to-use system for using Matlab (and other mathematical packages) on the Campus Computational Grid.
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Support and Infrastructure Needs (3/5)
• University provided training and documentation in: – Basic UNIX/Linux– UNIX/Linux Administration– Campus Grid– Data Stewardship– Writing e-Research grant proposals– Programming
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Support and Infrastructure Needs (4/5)
• A small (10’s of nodes) central University cluster.
• An expanded Campus Grid (Linux access to 500 PCs in library/labs when not in use by students) with more memory, local disk and check-pointing.
• A simplified method for accessing the Campus Grid.
• More information about the ACET Supercomputer: pricing, software, hardware type...
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Support and Infrastructure Needs (5/5)
• Locally provided web-server capacity for providing access to non-static data (e.g. searchable databases).
• Help with providing for the persistence of data/collections collected in research projects.
• An online collaboration platform for Research, available outside the University, like Blackboard or Subversion/TRAC.
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Priorities Survey: Results
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<- highest ranked (2 – very useful, 1 – useful, 0 – not useful) lowest ranked ->
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Overall Schools Coverage
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e-Research: Activities and Needs
Questions/Discussion
• We are especially interested in how relevant the Support and Infrastructure Needs highlighted are to you.
– I have paper versions of the follow-up survey for those who have not yet “voted”
– Take a copy for your colleagues or point them to http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/its/escience/its-eresearch-follow-up.asp (linked from http://www.reading.ac.uk/e-research)
• Steve will talk about our planned response to these needs in his talk
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