Slides from my panel session at Science & Innovation 2015 with STFC DiRAC, HPC Midlands, Francis Crick Institute and UCL. As we move into the expected post-election comprehensive spending review, it is a good time to take stock of some of the innovations that have helped the UK’s institutions and industry to work together to accelerate innovation whilst achieving operating efficiencies over the last few years. In this session we hear about trend setting initiatives such as Jisc’s shared data centre and equipment sharing initiative, which makes over £200m of capital equipment available for sharing between institutions and with industry, and industrial connectivity to the UK’s Janet network.

1. Frictionless sharing:The new normal?
Science & Innovation 2015
Photo CC BY-NC-SA Flickr user expressmonorail
110/06/2015 Science & Innovation 2015: Frictionless Sharing - The New Normal?

2. Themes
Frictionless sharing:
The new normal?
1. About Jisc
2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage
– Equipment sharing
– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
10/06/2015 Science & Innovation 2015: Frictionless Sharing - The New Normal? 2

3. Themes
Frictionless sharing:
The new normal?
1. About Jisc
2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage
– Equipment sharing
– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
10/06/2015 Science & Innovation 2015: Frictionless Sharing - The New Normal? 3

4. About Jisc
About Jisc:
› Registered charity championing the use of digital technologies in
research, education and skills
› Range of shared services, advice and support for UK institutions, e.g.
– Janet: World leading network, with eduroam global wireless roaming
– Cloud brokerage: Making Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds easier to use
– Assent: Log in with your institutional credentials to any service, from anywhere
– Reach: Industrial connectivity to Janet, at speeds up to 10Gbit/s
– Safe Share: Supporting sensitive data sharing for research, e.g. biomedical data
› Working with RCUK and Innovate UK to accelerate innovation
› Just launched: shared data centre, asset sharing initiative
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5. About Jisc
About Jisc:
› Registered charity championing the use of digital technologies in
research, education and skills
› Range of shared services, advice and support for UK institutions, e.g.
– Janet: World leading network, with eduroam global wireless roaming
– Cloud brokerage: Making Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds easier to use
– Assent: Log in with your institutional credentials to any service, from anywhere
– Reach: Industrial connectivity to Janet, at speeds up to 10Gbit/s
– Safe Share: Supporting sensitive data sharing for research, e.g. biomedical data
› Working with RCUK and Innovate UK to accelerate innovation
› Just launched: shared data centre, asset sharing initiative
10/06/2015 Science & Innovation 2015: Frictionless Sharing - The New Normal? 5

6. About Jisc » Janet network
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7. About Jisc » eduroam
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8. About Jisc » Amazon portal
Amazon cloud portal:
› Monthly invoicing - credit cards are no
longer required for payment
› Itemized billing - consolidated across
users/departments
› Billing in GBP, not dollars
› Setting of budget limits for individual user
accounts or departments
› The retrieval of service usage information
within own areas of responsibility
› Volume-discounts through aggregation
across multiple educational institutions
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9. About Jisc » Assent
Assent:
› Single, unifying technology that enables
you to effectively manage and control
access to a wide range of web and non-
web services and applications.
› These include cloud infrastructures,
High Performance Computing, Grid
Computing and commonly deployed
services such as email, file store, remote
access and instant messaging
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10. About Jisc » Reach
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Reach:
› £4M funding from BIS to work
towards a Janet which is
"open and accessible" to
industry
› Provides industry access to
university e-infrastructure
facilities to facilitate further
investment in science,
engineering and technology
with the active participation
of business and industry
› Modelled on Innovate UK
competition process

11. About Jisc » Safe Share
Safe Share:
› Providing and building services on
encryptedVPN infrastructure between
organisations
› Enhanced confidentiality and integrity
requirements per ISO27001
› Requirement to move electronic health
data securely and support research
collaboration
› Working with biomedical researchers at
Farr Institute, MRC Medical Bioinformatics
initiative, ESRCAdministrative Data
Centres
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12. Themes
Frictionless sharing:
The new normal?
1. About Jisc
2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage
– Equipment sharing
– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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13. Case Study » HPC brokerage
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HPC brokerage:
› Access to £60m of public investment in
supercomputing equipment and expertise
– Reduce friction of sharing between institutions & with industry
– “Pay as you go” model, no upfront capital costs
– Makes HPC accessible to those who could not previously
contemplate it
– Standardized terms and conditions including information
assurance, intellectual property, termination etc
› HPC is really a test case – could we apply this approach
more generally, building on the Brunswick
Agreements?

14. Case Study » HPC brokerage
James Earl-Fraser,
HPC Midlands
› EPSRC regional centre of excellence in
High Performance Computing
› Operated by Loughborough University
and University of Leicester
› Builds on long standing industrial
collaborations, e.g. E.ON, Rolls-Royce
› Offers a wide range of open source and
commercial off-the-shelf software on
attractive licensing terms
› Partnering with Jisc to share equipment and expertise
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15. Case Study » HPC brokerage
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16. Themes
Frictionless sharing:
The new normal?
1. About Jisc
2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage
– Equipment sharing
– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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17. Case Study » Equipment sharing
Equipment sharing:
› Working with EPSRC to create an
“one stop shop” for sharing
research equipment
› Piloting Kit-Catalogue equipment
database with 10 institutions
› Kit-Catalogue feeds into national
equipment.data.ac.uk portal
– Sharing details of 10,000 items of high
value equipment, value >£200m
› Newcastle University alone is
sharing £16m+ of >£20K value
equipment
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18. Case Study » Equipment sharing
Dr Jacky Pallas,
Director of Research Platforms, UCL
› 502 items of equipment ‘public’ in our Research Equipment
Catalogue (30% of total)
› 41% of UCL’s research facilities offer services to other academic
groups and 29% offer services to industry and gov’t agencies
– External academic users 12.4% of activity, 8.4% income
– Industry services 12.1% activity, 9.4% income
› Estimated value of ‘shared’ equipment >£50M
› All data collected annually throughTRAC exercise
– Reduced admin burden
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Photo credit: University College London

19. Themes
Frictionless sharing:
The new normal?
1. About Jisc
2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage
– Equipment sharing
– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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20. Case Study » Shared data centre
› £900K investment from HEFCE
› Anchor tenants:
– Francis Crick Institute
– King’sCollege London
– London School of Economics
– Queen Mary University of London
– WellcomeTrust Sanger Institute
– University College London
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21. Case Study » Shared data centre
Dr David Fergusson,
Head of Scientific Computing,
Francis Crick Institute
› Challenges of providing shared platforms
for staff from existing institutes
– CRUK London Research Institute
– National Institute for Medical Research
› Compute and data requirements for 1,250 scientists working in biomed
– In a central London building
› Direction of travel towards more and wider collaboration, requirement for
controlled sharing of sensitive data
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Photo credit: Francis Crick Institute

22. Themes
Frictionless sharing:
The new normal?
1. About Jisc
2. Case Studies
– HPC brokerage
– Equipment sharing
– Shared data centre
3. Panel discussion
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23. Panel discussion
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Dr JeremyYates, STFC DiRAC & SKA:
› The National e-Infrastructure for research & innovation
– A 60,000 foot view
– Democratisation & Aggiornamento
› Moving to a more cloud-centric view of
scientific computing
› Scientific computing that is not “HPC”
› Changing the culture around Research
Software Engineering
› Making industrial access to facilities the norm
› Inter-disciplinary science – blockers and enablers
Image credit:Courtesy of EPSRC

24. Find out more…
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Except where otherwise noted, this
work is licensed under CC-BY
Martin Hamilton
Futurist, Jisc, London
@martin_hamilton
martin.hamilton@jisc.ac.uk