e-Science in France, a Life science Western story (original) (raw)
Related papers
e-Infrastructures for e-Science: A Global View
Journal of Grid Computing, 2011
In the last 10 years, a new way of doing science is spreading in the world thank to the development of virtual research communities across many geographic and administrative boundaries. A virtual research community is a widely dispersed group of researchers and associated scientific instruments working together in a common virtual environment. This new kind of scientific environment, usually addressed as a “collaboratory”, is based on the availability of high-speed networks and broadband access, advanced virtual tools and Grid-middleware technologies which, altogether, are the elements of the e-Infrastructures. The European Commission has heavily invested in promoting this new way of collaboration among scientists funding several international projects with the aim of creating e-Infrastructures to enable the European Research Area and connect the European researchers with their colleagues based in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In this paper we describe the actual status of these e-Infrastructures and present a complete picture of the virtual research communities currently using them. Information on the scientific domains and on the applications supported are provided together with their geographic distribution.
A recent study promoted by The Royal Society in cooperation with Elsevier reviewed the changing patterns of science and scientific collaborations and confirmed that science is increasingly global, multipolar and networked (Llewellyn Smith, et al., 2011). This trend calls for innovative, dynamic and ubiquitous research supporting environments where scattered scientists can seamlessly access data, software, and processing resources managed by diverse systems in separate administration domains through their web browser.
Abstract-This paper describes the design of a cloud computing platform-e-Science Central (e-SC)-which provides both Software and Platform as a Service for scientific data management, analysis and collaboration. e-SC can be deployed on both private (eg Eucalyptus [1]) and public Clouds (Amazon AWS [2] and Microsoft Windows Azure [3]). The SaaS application allows scientists to upload data, edit and run workflows, and share results in the cloud.
Infrastructure, requirements and applications for e-Science
14th Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing, 2002. Proceedings., 2000
Recent developments in the international arena has meant the technology is now mature enough to bring together those required for the implementation of a grid computing facility. This paper examines the requirements and applications for an eScience infrastructure with particular reference to developments in Europe.
e-Sciences as research technologies: reconfiguring disciplines, globalizing knowledge
Social Science Information, 2008
This article examines recent e-science initiatives through the lens of the concept of 'research technologies'. It has been argued that e-science research, which makes use of advanced computing tools to share distributed resources via networks, changes the disciplinary nature of research towards greater interdisciplinarity and paves the way for the increasing globalization of research. However, these claims need to be instantiated in concrete research practices. The essay therefore presents three examples of research projects where these two features can be demonstrated. More generally these three projects -in social science hyperlink analysis, high-energy physics and astronomy -are examples of 'research technologies', which, it has been argued, are often a radical source of innovation. The article describes how the three projects illustrate these arguments about research technologies, but also how this concept is limited as e-science research is still ongoing. The conclusion assesses how the notion of research technologies is useful for understanding how networked computing technologies are changing the current landscape of knowledge production. Résumé. Cet article examine les initiatives récentes dans le domaine des e-sciences au travers du prisme du concept de 'technologies de la recherche'. Divers arguments ont été mis en avant, qui tendent à affirmer que la recherche en mode e-science, en utilisant des outils de calcul avancés pour mettre en commun des ressources distribuées par l'intermédiaire de réseaux, change la nature disciplinaire des recherches, induisant une plus grande interdisciplinarité et pave la route vers une globalisation accrue de la recherche. Cependant, ces affirmations doivent se vérifier dans les pratiques concrètes de recherche. L'article présente trois exemples de projets de recherche où ces deux Social Science Information 132 Social Science Information Vol 47 -no 2 caractéristiques peuvent être mises en évidence. De façon plus générale, ces trois projetsanalyse d'hyper liens en sciences sociales, physique des hautes énergies et astronomiesont autant d'exemples de 'technologies de la recherche' qui, on l'a souvent affirmé, sont la plupart du temps une source radicale d'innovation. L'auteur montre comment les trois projets de recherche illustrent ces arguments sur les 'technologies de la recherche', mais aussi dans quelle mesure ce concept est limité puisque la recherche en mode e-science est encore en devenir. La conclusion fait état de ce pourquoi la notion de 'technologies de la recherche' est utile pour comprendre comment les technologies de calcul mises en réseau sont en train de modifier le paysage actuel de la production de la connaissance.
The Collaborative Potential of Research Infrastructures in Addressing Global Scientific Questions
Biodiversity Information Science and Standards
Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by scientists to perform research and support innovation. A number of EU research infrastructures [e.g. e-Science and Technology European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (LifeWatch) European Research Iinfrastructures Consortium (ERIC); The European life-sciences Infrastructure for biological Information (ELIXIR); the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC ERIC); the European Research Infrastructure for Imaging Technologies in Biological and Biomedical Sciences (uroBioImaging ERIC)] have been building Virtual Research Environments (VREs), which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering, one stop data access to scientists, high computational capacity and collaborative research platforms in support of the requirements of the digital science. This presentation gives examples on the use of the vLabs developed by LifeWatch ERIC which have subsequently been taken up as web ...
e-Science Central for CARMEN: science as a service
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2010
Scientists face many severe challenges in extracting value from the increasingly large volumes of data they generate. In this paper we describe the requirements we have derived from working across a wide range of e-science projects. In particular, the CARMEN neuroinformatics project has exposed a range of challenges due to a need to analyse and share large volumes of data. We have identified the four key activities required by scientists with whom we work, and designed an integrated system-e-Science Central-to provide them. This exploits three emerging technologies: software as a service to avoid the need for users to deploy and maintain any of their own software; social networking to allow users to collaborate by sharing data, services and workflows in a controlled manner and Cloud computing to provide scalable compute resources. The system can not only be used through any web browser, but also provides an API so that applications can build on the core functionality. We describe the requirements, and the design that flows from them. This includes data storage with in-built versioning and signing, an in-browser workflow editor and a job scheduling system that allows workflows to be run both on local 'private' clouds and the Microsoft Azure Cloud. and processes information is one of the major challenges in science, and significant progress in this area could revolutionize biology, medicine and computer science; it would help promote an understanding of brain development, assist in drug design and help to understand how to design systems that can carry out tasks, such as complex image recognition, which are beyond the current artificial computational systems.
2009
As science progresses we witness evolution and revolution in scientific understanding. Coupled intricately with this is an evolution and revolution in scientific techniques and methods: our ability to solve scientific problems advances as new methods lead to new understanding, and this in turn generates new methods. In the last 10 years science has experienced a step change in problem-solving ability, brought about by the increasing digitisation and automation of scientific practice.
e-Sciences: Infrastructures that reshape the Global Contours of Knowledge
Proceedings of the Second International Conference …
The contribution that e-Sciences make towards communicating and collaborating via networks will take many different forms, but it is argued here that the overall effect of these new tools will be to reshape the contours of scientific knowledge, creating a new divide between the visibility of online and offline knowledge. This divide points to the contribution that e-Sciences make towards the increasing globalization of scientific knowledge. Online scientific knowledge will also allow a more effective mapping of knowledge within different domains. This paper will locate e-Sciences within the broader intellectual and social organization of scientific knowledge.