UK scientists and
businesses will have access to the most sophisticated technology
keeping them at the cutting edge of research and development, as
details of the Government’s multi-million pound e-infrastructure
investment were announced today by David Willetts.
The investment includes £43 million for ARCHER, a new national
supercomputer to support advanced research, such as complex
chemistry and climate science, while helping industry design new
products. For sectors such as aerospace and automotive, this could
lead to better analysis of car incidents, helping industry build
safer vehicles in less time.
E-infrastructure also supports the world’s best researchers
through increased data storage and faster networks.
Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts said:
“We should not think of infrastructure as just roads and railways
– it’s also the networks and systems that underpin our
world-leading science and research base. This ambitious and
forward-looking programme of investment will be vital for
businesses and universities alike. It will improve research and
manufacturing processes and reduce the time and money it takes to
bring a product to market.
“This will drive growth and innovation across a whole range of
sectors and ensure our leading institutions and companies are able
to exploit the very latest technology.”
The following projects will also benefit from the £158 million investment:
* £30 million for the Daresbury Science and Innovation
Campus, supporting research into the latest product development software;
* £24 million for high capacity data storage across the
Research Councils, ensuring researchers can easily access complex
information from experiments;
* £31 million to improve high capacity networks, including
JANET, the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s system
that helps the higher education community share large amounts of
research data more easily;
* £19 million for specialist supercomputers in areas such as
particle physics and astronomy, weather forecasting and climate
change, and genome analysis;
* £4.75 million for the UK Space Agency to support the
collection and storage of data from satellites; and
* £6.5 million to establish a research fund for collaborative
university projects to improve access to
e-infrastructure.
Welcoming the news, Chair of Research
Councils UK (RCUK) Professor Rick Rylance said:
“This investment is especially welcome in the challenging
economic times we all face. Investment in high performance
computing and increased data storage capacity is essential to
ensure research in the UK remains at the cutting-edge in the most
advanced areas and is capable of stimulating growth. It signals
once again RCUK’s commitment to supporting the best and the most
innovative work and ensuring the future prosperity and wellbeing
of the UK.”
This investment is in addition to the ring-fenced science and
research budget and is subject to business case approval.
Notes to editors
1.
E-infrastructure consists of data storage, faster networks and
large, high-performance supercomputers (HPC).
2. HPC is the use of powerful and massively parallel
processors to tackle problems that are very computer or
data-intensive. The largest supercomputers containing hundreds of
thousands of processors can operate at around
1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second.
3. We are investing £145 million in e-infrastructure with
additional £13M from the Autumn Statement, bringing the total to
£158M. This allows for the complete funding of ARCHER, the new
national supercomputer.
4. BIS's online newsroom contains the latest press
notices, speeches, as well as video and images for download. It
also features an up to date list of BIS press office contacts. See
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for more information.
Case studies
Weather forecasting
The new, more-powerful, Met Office supercomputer has been
operational since 2009. It is now providing more accurate
forecasting of small-scale, high-impact weather events, with
earlier warnings for the public and civil response authorities. It
has also resulted in continued improvements in the quality of
routine automated UK and global forecasts at all ranges, which is
particularly beneficial during volcanic ash incidents, storms and
floods, and for transport providers and utility companies.
Part of the £145 million will be invested in the highly
successful joint Natural Environment Research Council and Met
Office supercomputing project (‘MONSooN’) based at Exeter. The
weather and climate research undertaken on MONSooN helps to
improve our understanding of atmospheric science, leading to
improved weather services and advice for policy makers, business
and the public. MONSooN Phase 2 will enable the capacity to be
increased by 50 per cent.
DNA sequencing
DNA sequencing requires e-infrastructure to process and interpret
increasingly large amounts of research data. Investment will be
made to develop new computing infrastructure at The Genome
Analysis Centre in Norwich, which receives strategic funding from
the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
It will be equipped with cutting edge computing hardware for data
processing, vital for providing high quality, meaningful
information to researchers in industry and academia in support of
global challenges like food security. This could ultimately lead
to, for example, the development of better crops, able to
withstand challenging conditions like drought.
Aerospace and automotive manufacturing
To compete with the rest of the world, British manufacturers need
to bring the most sophisticated technology to market as quickly
and cheaply as possible. To meet these challenges, the aerospace
industry is making increasing use of “virtual prototyping”, with
an aim for physical testing to be all but eliminated until the
final verification phases. This reduces product development risk
and can lead to new manufacturing processes.
In the past the automobile industry would have been content to
model the collapse of the rear bumper of a car on impact. Now the
industry has the ability to model the effect of the impact on the
structure of the whole car, the deployment of the air bag and even
the effect of the impact on the internal organs of the passenger.
These approaches places enormous demands on e-infrastructure, but
are essential if the UK is to remain at the leading edge of
manufacturing. We are investing in the software development tools
to model and simulate these product and process developments.
Digital media
The entertainment and media industry is a $1.7 trillion
market, and the production engines of TV, films and gaming are
making increasing demands on computer processing.
The
creative industries have always pushed the boundaries of hardware
and software to ensure maximum ‘realism’ in representing the
world, and DreamWorks (producers of Shrek and Monsters Versus
Aliens) considers HPC to be one its most vital strategic assets.
The UK Visual Effects (VFX) and post-production industry is one
of the top three in world, and to remain so it will have to be at
the forefront of technological development, including HPC.
Currently, VFX work is a very slow process for the creation of a
high quality image. Real time rendering, driven by HPC, will be a
major commercial driver when film studios and production companies
are choosing their post-production houses.
Game developers already use real-time rendering - even at TV
HD quality - but to improve image quality and match those of film
and future TV resolutions, these developers will need HPC -
especially as content is transferred from one medium to another.
The introduction of stereoscopic and auto-stereoscopic
(glasses-free) 3D, particularly for live events, is currently
hindered by the lack of good and reliable real time processing for
the alignment of the left and right eye image channels. This can
only be resolved by HPC.
Contacts:
BIS Press Office
NDS.BIS@coi.gsi.gov.uk
Sally Catmull
Phone: 020 7215 6577
sally.catmull@bis.gsi.gov.uk