Last year Jeremy Yates from UCL co-ordinated a landmark survey of the UK's national academic "e-Infrastructure" facilities, which subsequently went on to inform funding and policy decisions. We are re-running the survey again for 2014, and a short report summarising the results will be presented to the RCUK National E-Infrastructure Group and the UK government's E-Infrastructure Leadership Council in early April. If you run an institutional, regional or national facility, we'd love to hear from you.


The Deadline is 9am on Monday 24th March 2014 - this is when we will begin writing up the report. The reports' authors will be Jeremy Yates (Project Directors Group), Neil Chue Hong (Software Sustainability Institute), Simon Hettrick (SSI), myself (representing HPC Midlands / Jisc), Oz Parchment (HPC-SIG), Alan Real (HPC-SIG),  Andrew Richards (EPSRC Regional Centres) and Harpreet Dhanoa (Project Directors Group).

Please can I ask e-Infrastructure / HPC service providers to fill in the Service Management and System Details forms using the web links below. If you have more than one system, please fill and submit the System Details form for each system. There are only a couple of mandatory questions on each form, so please don't feel that you are expected to provide a response to every question.

Service Management:                                    System Details:

  

We expect that the survey results will inform further BIS e-Infrastructure initiatives through RCUK and the Technology Strategy Board - e.g. potential Catapult centre "on-ramp" projects. We also hope that institutions will also find them useful for their own planning purposes.

Many respondents to the 2013 survey noted that resourcing for e-Infrastructure services was a particular pain point for them, and to this end we have included several questions about staffing effort in areas such as developer support, application support and training. We also ask respondents about budget arrangements in their organization for refreshing e-Infrastructure facilities, and any specialist connectivity requirements.