Response to the UK Research Computing Ecosystem White Paper, presented at the UCL Town Hall in July 2011.

1. www.software.ac.uk
The role of software in the UK
Research Computing Ecosystem
8 July 2011
Neil Chue Hong, Director, SSI
N.ChueHong@software.ac.uk
Software Sustainability Institute

2. UK Research Computing
Ecosystem www.software.ac.uk
People
Computing Software Communities Data Centres
…
Network/Collaboration
Instruments
Software Sustainability Institute

3. Observations
www.software.ac.uk
• Software now has a longer lifetime of effectiveness than
hardware
 And people’s knowledge is even longer
• The right software makes the hardware exploitable by more
researchers
 Allows computing to be treated as a commodity asset
• Demanding users of computational infrastructure are
coming from arts + humanities / social science
 Software frameworks must support all types of app
• A culture of reuse rather than reinvention is not widespread
 Originality is good but must be balanced by consolidation
• The best research is trans-national: our infrastructure must
support this
Software Sustainability Institute

4. A More Manageable Ecosystem
www.software.ac.uk
• Discourage duplicative software development in research
grants by encouraging reuse and long-term development
 Need to change perceptions so that software is seen as valuable
(and not just invaluable when it disappears)
• Some specialist support should be provided and funded
separately
 Maintenance vs. research vs. development
• We cannot assume that the way people interact with the
ecosystem will conform to expectations
 Training early in career should be on exploiting, not conforming
• Well supported open platforms are the key in the age of the
research mashup
 Create a larger proportion of enabled researchers and provide
the ramps to go from desktop to high-end infrastructure
Software Sustainability Institute

5. Road ahead
www.software.ac.uk
• Long term funding, but not necessarily longer term
milestones
 Projects and groups must have a roadmap to build against and
we must retain competition and excellence without losing skills
• Encourage software to be more collaborative and recognise
the need to support its users for the long-term
 Too much falling by the wayside for lack of decent ongoing
support: opportunity for new orgs to enter community?
• Specific funding for developing and maintaining
infrastructure
 Particularly innovative software development which aims for
further along the infrastructure roadmap
• Recognise the distinction between encouraging the
“emergent” communities and translating successes into the
“mainstream” of research: requirements are not the same
Software Sustainability Institute