Large scale computing is a fundamental and necessary part of modern research across all disciplines. Federation of national, regional, and institutional computing resources has the potential to realise significant benefits for users, resource and service providers, and funders.
The key benefits federation can deliver are:
improved accessibility for users,
enhanced data accessibility and sharing,
efficient use of deployed resources through pooling and sharing,
enhanced sharing of expertise and experience across disciplinary boundaries,
enhanced cybersecurity through joined-up operations and policy,
enhanced resilience through the distribution of interoperable resources and services
a larger community of highly skilled researchers and technical staff entering UK force
The diversity of requirements across different communities and existing infrastructure deployments poses real challenges to building a joined-up federation that can realise these benefits.
This Network-Plus aims to identify the pathway to deliver these benefits through the building of a broad and diverse community around joined-up large-scale computing and leveraging this to develop strategic roadmaps to achieve a national federated compute service that encompasses both computation and data federation.
The roadmaps will be developed based on evidence drawn from diverse communities, domain representatives, and stakeholders, together with resource and service providers. A foundational principle is that the federation will be built primarily through aggregation of both new and existing services and communities, leveraging existing technologies and expertise wherever possible.
We organise ourselves around three key pillars:
Community Engagement relating to user stories, provider business cases, and co-development of the federation roadmaps,
Technology and Architecture relating to the technologies, system architectures, and requirements that define the hardware and software that will create the technical component of the federation,
Governance and Policy that relate to how communities will build and regulate their relationships to manage trust, security, and organisation.