MeSC
The Midlands e-Science Centre (MeSC)
was one of the seven Regional e-Science Centres of Excellence
funded by the
UK e-Science Core Programme. MeSC was based in
Birmingham but involved all major Universities in the West
Midlands region, to which it made a number of strategic
contributions:
- It was instrumental in pooling together a critical mass of researchers across the Universities with wide-ranging expertise and needs in data and CPU intensive techniques for computational modelling, fostering multi-disciplinary collaboration on a large scale and leading to a growth in inter-disciplinary computing work.
- It initiated and supported several prestigious inational and international research projects and opened new opportunities for further research and funding benefiting the region's scientific community.
- In addition to providing expertise and support for the utilization of high performance computing and Grid technologies by researchers across multiple disciplines, MeSC set up and provided the first high performance research computing facility (a compute “e-Science cluster” and the first Access Grid Node in the campus) which was very heavily used by a growing and wide user base across the University of Birmingham.
- MeSC was a catalyst for strategic developments in the University of Birmingham in the areas of high performance computing and infrastructures. It acted as a pilot platform to analyse supercomputing requirements for the region's research community and led to the establishment of the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research
MeSC used to have its own www site at: www.mesc.bham.ac.uk. It has since been removed. It is archived here for historical purposes (some of the links may not work).
Publications
- Zhang, Y., Theodoropoulos G., “Grid-enabling the Midlands: The Midlands e-Science Centre of Excellence”, International Workshop on Data Processing and Storage Networking: Towards Grid-Computing”, in conjunction with the 3rd IFIP-TC6 Networking Conference (Networking 2004), 14 May 2004, Athens Greece.