Software Sustainability Institute

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

www.software.ac.uk

People

UK Research Computing Ecosystem

Computing Communities

…

Network/Collaboration

Instruments

Software Data Centres

Software Sustainability Institute

www.software.ac.uk

Observations

• 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

www.software.ac.uk

A More Manageable Ecosystem

• 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

www.software.ac.uk

Road ahead

• 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 recognisethe 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