Who do we work with?
The Software Sustainability Institute works with a range of projects - tackling everything from library searches to nuclear fusion.
Generating neutrinos - MAUS
Neutrinos are particles produced in highly energetic processes, like those that occur in the sun, nuclear reactors or the big bang. Neutrinos interact only very weakly with other matter (they can pass through the Earth even easier than light passes though glass). This means that a neutrino experiment needs to use huge quantities of neutrinos to ensure that enough interactions will occur to produce results. The MICE collaboration, with some help from the Software Sustainability Institute, will design a crucial part of a neutrino factory, which will create neutrinos in the vast quantities needed.
Making HPC accessible - SPRINT
SPRINT provides easy access to high-performance computing for the analysis of high-throughput, post-genomic data using the statistical programming language R. The Software Sustainability Institute are helping SPRINT to improve their user engagement and provide improved resources and support. Our developers are working with teams from SPRINT, the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and the Centre for Cardiovascular Research to add functionality to SPRINT and R to enable the processing of next-generation sequencing data.
Textual studies - TEXTvre
TEXTvre supports the complete lifecycle of research in e-Humanities textual studies. The project provides researchers with advanced services to process and analyse research texts that are held in formally managed, metadata-rich institutional repositories. The access and analysis of textual research data will be supported by annotation and retrieval technology and will provide services for every step in the digital research life cycle.
Nuclear Fusion - Culham Centre for Fusion Energy
Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, promises abundant and carbon-free energy.
The Culham Centre is a world-leading fusion research laboratory, and a major user of the GS2 gyrokinetic turbulence simulator which models conditions in a fusion reactor. SSI have worked with Culham to take the many different visualisation extensions for GS2 and create an enhanced visualiser based on the open-source Paraview platform. This visualiser will be easy for Culham to maintain on behalf of the fusion research community.
Pharmacology - DMACRYS
In pharmaceutical chemistry, determining a drug's molecular crystal structure is critical.
Sally Price's Research Group at UCL has developed DMACRYS - software that simulates the likely crystal structures an organic molecule can adopt. We are helping to improve DMACRYS's sustainability by increasing its portability and upgrading its testing and development infrastructure.
Climate change - Enhancing Community Integrated Assessment System for Climate Policy
Policymakers could gain increased confidence in climate-change predictions if existing, disparate climate models are unified.
We are working with the ECIAS project to add more sophisticated modelling to a unified climate model so that more factors can contribute to the model’s predictions. We are also adding batch processing, which will allow many users to simultaneously query the climate model, and a new search interface, which will allow easy analysis of previous results.
Geospatial Information - Geospatial transformations with OGSA-DAI
Combining different sources of geospatial information can help identify crime hotspots, design better bus routes and improve the response to national emergencies.
GeoTOD will transform geospatial information into a linked-data form, enabling environmental and other data to become part of the linked-data web, and contributing to the UK Government's Location Strategy.
SSI provided consultancy in the use of OGSA-DAI to develop GeoTOD’s data-linking platform.
Making software accessible - Brain Research Imaging Centre
The Brain Research Imaging Centre (BRIC) is based at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh. BRIC researchers use a wide variety of medical imaging techniques to better understand psychiatric disorders and diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, stroke and prion diseases (BSE/CJD). Many applications for medical image processing and analysis have been developed at BRIC. The wider adoption of these applications could advance our knowledge of the brain and its function, so BRIC are releasing the applications to the wider imaging community.
The Software Sustainability Institute has worked with BRIC to enhance two of their applications, assisting BRIC researchers in moving development to open source projects at SourceForge.
Keeping up to date with research - JournalTOCs
It is vital for researchers to keep completely up to date with the latest results from their discipline. This leads to new contacts and new opportunities for collaboration, which can lead to new projects and more funding. If nothing else, knowing what’s going on in their field allows researchers to ensure their own research is novel. With the bewildering number of ways in which researchers can now communicate – e-mails, blogs, RSS, Facebook, Twitter – tools are needed to help researchers hack through this jungle of communication to find the relevant information.
Last updated: Thursday 1 December 2011.
