Birmingham Science City - IT Infrastructure Theme
In 2005 the British government designated Birmingham as a “Science City” and made a capital investment of £80M for interdisciplinary, inter-institutional academic research between Birmingham and Warwick, the region’s two highest ranking research universities. This was complemented by £9.6M by the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Strategic Development Fund. The Science City objectives are implemented through the Birmingham Warwick Science City Interdisciplinary Research Alliance (SCIRA).
Within SCIRA, the "IT Infrastructure Theme" aimed to provide a regional parallel computing infrastructure and associated expertise in high performance computing and computational modelling that would underpin and support the Science City research. The mechanism to achieve this was:
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The HEFCE-funded SCIRA scheme for Research Fellows.
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The Midlands Alliance for Research Computing (MARC), which aimed to provide a regional high performance infrastructure across Birmingham and Warwick.
The IT Infrastructure Theme was finally integrated in the three major research themes of SCIRA (advanced materials, energy futures and translational medicine).
The IT Infrastructure Theme was originally championed by Rudolf A Roemer and Georgios Theodoropoulos.