Study of User Priorities for e-Infrastructure for e-Research (SUPER)

Abstract

SUPER, a Study of User Priorities for e-infrastructure for Research, was a six-month effort funded by the UK e-Science Core Programme (EPSRC & JISC) to identify short-term needs that can be delivered within existing funding streams from organisations, and longer-term concerns. The aim is to provide a usable, useful, and accessible e-infrastructure for researchers across a wide variety of disciplines, integrate existing and new e-infrastructure facilities and services into a coherent whole, and provide the basis to increase the use of the existing e-infrastructures by a factor greater than ten by 2010. The study involved visits to seven universities, and interviews with approximately 45 people active in more than 30 projects. This report sets out the major recurring issues that were identified in these discussions, and proposes a detailed programme of investment in software, policy and support in order to address these needs and concerns. UK e-Science Technical Report Series Report UKeS-2007-01 Available from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2007-01.pdf Copyright © 2007 The University of Edinburgh. All rights reserved Executive Summary SUPER, a Study of User Priorities for e-infrastructure for Research, was a six-month effort funded by the UK e-Science Core Programme and JISC to identify short-term (6–18 months) needs that can be delivered within existing funding streams from organisations, and longer-term (3–5 years) concerns. During the study we visited seven universities and spoke with approximately 45 people active in more than 30 projects. From these discussions we identified five major recurring common issues: • Distributed file management and policy relating to their curation • Tools to support the creation and use of dynamic virtual organisations • Need to support projects through tools and training • Operational provision of authentication, software licensing, and reliable and consistent environments across distributed resources • User interaction with e-infrastructure services through defined APIs, scripting environments, and graphical workflow environments As a result of the survey we recommend investment in three broad areas: software, policy and support, with items listed in no particular order. • Software o Automatic data annotation and provenance tools to support domain specific schema o Mechanisms to support controlled and convenient sharing of files between groups o Reliable documented software base to enable virtual organisations built around individuals to gain access to services and resources, and collaborative mechanisms to facilitate research between these individuals o Licensemanagement software, across a site and across a VO o Simplified authentication tools – better user interfaces and focus on ease of use and local (client) deployment o Integration of e-infrastructure resources into the environments in regular use by applied end-users (e.g., Matlab, Jython, Perl, R, portals) o Better tools for understanding failures and increasing reliability • Policy o Development of a best practice document to support research groups in developing their own data curation and file management policy o Development of common annotation schemes for individual communities to enable consistent metadata labelling within these communities o Defining a set of recognised roles, actions, and relationships to support the construction of virtual organisations o Consistent environment guidelines for machine interactions, especially with the NGS, so users see one environment across a Grid • Support: o Better technical consultancy to end-users who wish to move their applications to use e-infrastructure services, developers who wish to use best practice to build e-infrastructure services, and deployers who need to

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