Log in
This impact case study delivers a sustainable approach to the provision of large-scale Cloud Computing resources, through an international research collaboration. Such a platform enables the widening of participation in Higher Education (HE) across nations, by transforming the provision of IT system resources. The transformation is achieved through the effective sharing and utilisation of flexibly reconfigurable computing resources, whilst reducing the impact upon global carbon emissions. Significantly, the international nature of this research has been recognised by considerable funding from both Chinese and UK agencies. Additionally, the creation of closer research links between international partners has resulted in industrial commercialisation.
Cloud computing is now used ubiquitously in consumer and commerce domains yielding unprecedented access to computing and data handling at affordable prices.
Work in this field was pioneered at the University of Southampton (UoS) from 1998 onwards and commercialised from 2008 through Dezineforce to enable companies to exploit cloud computing in engineering:
Throughout this period the team has also engaged in outreach to inspire and educate the next generation of scientists and engineers about High Performance and Cloud computing including a YouTube video with 485,000 hits and over 300 articles in media.
Gateway technologies have enhanced the ability of end-users to engage with high-performance computing (HPC) programs on massively distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) such as clusters, grids and clouds. The technologies are focussed on the needs of business, industry, organisations and communities; enabling them to extract added business and social benefit from custom high-value services running on a wide range of high-performance DCIs. Typically, such services are based on computational workflows tailored to specific business needs. DCIs may comprise resources already owned (eg. clusters) combined with resources rented on a pay-as-you- go basis (eg. clouds). Several companies and organisations worldwide are currently using the technologies.
The Network & Information Security Technology Lab (NISTL) at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) conducts research in securing networked systems against the growing threat of cyber crime. The research has generated a correlated set of new security protocols, novel system composition methods and efficient digital forensic analysis schemes for more effective layered security protection. Their main impacts for the period 01/2008 - 07/2013 are highlighted below:
In addition to the above direct impacts, our work is also beneficial to other organisations and even the general public, as they all require security techniques for information protection.
The invention of a novel component-based model and approach for rapid distributed software development are the core research results for this case study. Using our methodology we have built a fully functional platform — the Grid Integrated Development Environment (GIDE) — which has been used for the development of user applications by several industrial partners. The main economic impact of our work is the new component-based development process resulting in much higher productivity and shorter development cycle. In addition, the four new international standards approved by ETSI provide impact on the wider professional community in the areas of grid and cloud computing.
Research in the UoA has underpinned the development of the current version of BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), a technology to enable secure volunteer computing. The research was done as part of the climateprediction.net project that is currently managed as CPDN through the UoA, supporting international climate modelling. CPDN models climate change using donated cycles on users' computers, with almost 700,000 users registered by 2013. Significant work to develop BOINC in CPDN has enabled the public to engage with science more easily and conveniently. BOINC has become recognised as the key open-source tool for volunteer computing and is also available to companies to create their own grid networks. It has been used for a range of applications from driving experiments to find the Higgs particle to using home PCs to detect earthquakes.
Research undertaken between 2002 and 2012 at Birkbeck has helped establish a participatory approach to cyber-physical computing as the predominant methodology for the construction of mobile and pervasive computing systems. Cyber-physical systems intimately interlink material entities and their information representations as existing on the Internet. Our specific research contributions in systems architecture, privacy protection and human dynamics have demonstrated how the user's activity can be exploited as the core ingredient in building such systems. Our research has resulted in the implementation of applications that are used to monitor biodiversity across the globe, to assess and support Parkinson's disease patients in the UK, to improve the well-being of office workers in London, to engage the public in a debate about the costs and benefits of pervasive computing, and to inform legislatures in the UK and the US.
This case study reports our work on the development, application and dissemination of innovative cloud-based technologies to industrial problem domains. First, decentralised scheduling is implemented within federated Clouds, to facilitate the new drug discovery process for a global pharmaceutical company. Second, multi-objective approaches to the management and optimisation of video processing and analysis workflows in distributed environments is described in the context of an SME organisation that is developing new products, services and markets. Both of these examples have attracted, and continue to attract, commercial funding, and demonstrate the efficacy of knowledge transfer into industry from University of Derby (UoD) research.
GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering—see http://gate.ac.uk/) is an experimental apparatus, R&D platform and software suite with very wide impact in society and industry. There are many examples of applications: the UK National Archive uses it to provide sophisticated search mechanisms over its .gov.uk holdings; Oracle includes it in its semantics offering; Garlik Ltd. uses it to mine the web for data that might lead to identity theft; Innovantage uses it in intelligent recruiting products; Fizzback uses it for customer feedback analysis; the British Library uses it for environmental science literature indexing; the Stationery Office for value-added services on top of their legal databases. It has been adopted as a fundamental piece of web infrastructure by major organisations like the BBC, Euromoney and the Press Association, enabling them to integrate huge volumes of data with up-to-the-minute currency at an affordable cost, delivering cost savings and new products.
Grid computing research conducted by the High Energy Physics (HEP) Group at the University of Cambridge, Department of Physics has enabled software company IMENSE to develop and commercialise a range of content based image recognition products. The research gained substantial media interest and was featured at the BA Festival of Science 2008.