The e-Science Programme & White Rose Grid

By Tom Jackson (Advanced Computer Architectures Group, Department of Computer Science, University of York, UK)

ABSTRACT

This talk will provide insight into the development of the White Rose Grid (WRG) and its role in facilitating collaborative research within the UK e-Science programme. The White Rose Grid was one of the first operational academic Grids in the UK. The project operates under the auspices of the White Rose University Consortium, which is an association of the three major research Universities in Yorkshire – Leeds, Sheffield and York.  The WRG offers large heterogeneous computational facilities funded with over £5m investment and has been operational since 2002.

The White Rose Grid has provided the compute infrastructure that has enabled collaborative research in a wide range of disciplines.  This talk will focus on just one WRG example; an e-Science pilot project, DAME, (Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment) carried out in collaboration with Rolls-Royce and Data Systems and Solutions.   The central challenge of the DAME (www.cs.york.ac.uk/dame) project was the development of tools and services for the analysis of real-time health monitoring data for civil jet-engines. Deployed on the WRG, DAME provided a proof of concept demonstrator for a virtual organization and workbench for distributed maintenance activities and the management of vast, distributed, homogeneous data repositories of engine health-monitoring data.  The research and development activities related to deploying these diverse services as Grid enabled applications in an operational Grid environment (the White Rose Grid) provided a model of how future remote and distributed health monitoring applications could be deployed.  These central ideas have been carried forward by Rolls-Royce into an internal Grid deployment, called BROADEN, funded to the through UK DTI Technology Programme Call.

BIODATA

Dr Thomas Jackson was awarded a BEng in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from Salford University in 1998 and awarded a DPhil in Computer Science from the University of York, in 1995.  His major field of study was neural computing and artificial intelligence.

He is currently the White Rose Grid Project Officer at the University of York, managing a diverse range of Grid computing activities, including major e-Science technology demonstrators in the area of aeroengine diagnostics, in collaboration with Rolls-Royce and Data Systems and Solutions.  Prior to this he served for five years as a Scientific Officer for the European Commission at the EC Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy.   Between 1988 and 1993 he was a senior engineer within the Systems Computing R&D group of British Aerospace Military Aircraft Limited. This group specialised in advanced concepts and future projects for avionic flight systems. Between 1993 and 1997 he was Research Manager for the High Integrity Systems Engineering group in the Computer Science Department of the University of York.

He is the author/co-author of numerous publications in refereed conferences and journals, and co-author of the book ‘An Introduction to Neural Computing’ (Bristol, IOP, 1990).