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Workshop on Research Opportunities

This week will see the annual conference for UK e-Science, which for historical reasons is called the e-Science All-Hands Meeting. I have organised a knowledge transfer workshop for the Tuesday afternoon, with the aims of presenting research opportunities for e-Science in the UK commercial and public sectors. We have four excellent speakers lined up.

Mark Ferrar is the Director of Infrastructure Architecture for NHS Connecting for Health in England. Mark is interested in opportunities for using the processing power available to the NHS to improve clinical outcomes, for example by running HPC models and diagnosis applications.

Liam Newcombe is tackling the question of "Green IT" in data centres. This is a big topic in the industry, because energy prices are rising and carbon accounting is being deployed. Liam has developed an open-source integrated model of data centres for the BCS and the Carbon Trust. He is looking for collaborators to further improve this model.

Alexander Efimov will give us a presentation about the exploitation of e-science technologies. Alex is from the CERN and ESA UK Technology Transfer Office. He is working with Constellation Technologies to build a business around the provision of services using the open-source gLite software.

Finally, Chris Greenwell of Durham University will present a new collaborative R&D project. The NIMES project is using e-science to directly improve the performance and reduce the environmental damage of the oil drilling industry, via a combination of computational modelling, visualisation and computation steering. This shows the opportunities that arise from the continuing improvement of e-science technologies.

The workshop will conclude with a panel discussion. Full details can be found here.

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