What is e-Science?
e-Science has been defined by John Taylor (Director General
of the UK Research Councils) as,
global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of
infrastructure that will enable it.
The UK Government is investing £120M over the next three years in e-Science.
Further details of the national e-Science programme can be found
elsewhere.
More generally e-Science refers to the development of the next generation
infrastructure to support computationally based science. This involves the
effective utilisation of distributed
computing, storage and networking resources owned by
different organisations but used by individuals both
within and outside these organisations. These resources are collectively
referred to as a
Computational Grid and are described by Ian Foster and
Carl Kesselman in their book, "The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing
Infrastructure" (Morgan Kaufmann, 1999; ISBN
1-55860-475-8).
e-Science envisages that large scale science will be increasingly carried
out in distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. A feature
of these collaborations is that they will require efficient access to very
large data collections and very large scale computing resources and will
use distributed visualisation to support a high-level of user access.
Notable examples of e-Science applications are the Large Hadron Collider at CERN
and the
exploration of the Human Genome and related Life Science data resources.
