e-Research South Projects

MashMyData

MashMyData is a 1-year Technology Proof of Concept project, funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council. It is led by the University of Reading, with STFC as a partner and test-case users at the University of Oxford. It aims to provide a demonstrator web platform for allowing users to upload their data for visual and quantitative comparison with centrally-held data (e.g. on the NERC Data Grid and the Earth System Grid). Initial test cases will be in the areas of biogeochemistry (where ocean temperature proxy data from plankton will be compared with in situ measurements) and meteorology. The idea is to free the user from the need to understand the technical details of the centrally-held datasets and to perform simple but useful intercomparison tasks using only a web browser.

BlogMyData

The Universities of Reading and Southampton have won funding from the JISC Virtual Research Environment Rapid Innovation programme to combine the capabilities of Reading’s “Godiva2” online data visualization system with Southampton’s LabBlog facility. This will create a new website for researchers to collaborate on interpreting large and complex environmental datasets using a standards-based Geographic Information System.

"English Identities" Landscape Archaeology

A three month collaboration between the Oxford eResearch Centre and the Institute of Archaeology both based at the University of Oxford and aims to scope the technical requirements of the ‘English Identities’ project.

e-Infrastructure Access Mechanisms

Within this project we will be assessing the best methods that we can use to federate access to resources within the four partner institutions of eResearch South. This will start with a survey of resources that we wish to enable using this federated mechanism and then available mechanisms. The starting point for this is the Shibboleth mechanisms built within the SARoNGS project in collaboration with the UK NGS. Next steps for this include identification of resources within eResearch South institutions that are willing to support SARoNGS.

NeuroHub: the information environment for Neuroscientists

The OeRC, in collaboration with the Universities of Reading and Southampton has recently been awarded funding by JISC for a project in the A2 Strand - Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines.

Water Resource Modelling on Grids

We are helping the Walker Institute to run ensembles of hydrological models across a range of computational resources to map out future water resource availability across the UK and beyond. We have deployed SSHFS across the Reading Campus grid to enable large IO streams to be used for this modelling as the ensembles are driven by multiple scenarios of future hydrological conditions. This solves a common problem with Climate modelling on Grids and we expect to roll out this solution into many other climate modelling projects. The image below illustrates some of the results obtained by running an ensemble of models on the Reading Campus Grid.

Smart Labs

The Smart Lab is an e-Research project that began under the UK e-Science Initiative as part of the CombeChem Project End-to-End Digital Support for Chemical Research to investigate the ways in which the modern digital environment can improve the efficiency and accuracy of laboratory science; a green approach to laboratory informatics!