Beefing up our electronic research infrastructure

Irish research centres are co-operating to construct a high-speed network that can handle enormous amounts of data

BIG SCIENCE can mean big data – whether it’s continuous monitoring of brain activity in premature babies or running massive climate simulations. Such enormous datasets can swamp regular computing resources and networks. But a €12.5-million initiative funded by the Higher Education Authority to beef up electronic infrastructure for researchers in Ireland has been gathering pace – and the newest development is a dedicated optical network that leaves conventional broadband speeds in the shade.

“The objective is to advance the ICT side of the research infrastructure in Ireland, what we generally term as e-infrastructure,” says e-Inis project co-ordinator Dr Keith Rochford, who is based at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. And as you might expect, the roll-call of partners on the project is a long one: Dias, the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (Ichec), HEAnet, Grid-Ireland, NUI Galway, University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin and NUI Maynooth are all involved.

As well as bumping up the ability to compute and handle data, the project also wants to enable collaborating researchers here to share information more efficiently, according to Rochford.

That’s why the project has been contributing to the upgrade of existing HEAnet links between institutions so that they can support “lambda switching” of optical information through a virtual network, he explains.

Already the Irish Research Optical Network has supported the speedy transfer of information at a rate of 10 gigabits per second between data resources hosted at the Boole Centre for Research Informatics at UCC and Dias – that’s around 50 times faster than residential broadband connections in Ireland. So who is lining up to use these bigger, faster powers? The data hogs tend to be the earth and life sciences, and Rochford tells how Irish partners in the European climate-modelling project EC Earth are using the upgraded infrastructure to keep things zipping long.

“People in Ichec, UCD and Met Éireann are running climate simulations on the computer resources and the outputs of those have to be made available to wider collaborations,” he says.

“Without this network the simulation would run for a little while then it would fill up the local storage and they would have to stop the simulation while they take it off the local storage. But with a network like this you can run the simulation and write the data sufficiently quickly that the information won’t be affected.”

The infrastructure also means a group in Cork that monitors brain activity in newborn babies at risk of seizures can collect data from partners in a Europe-wide study. “The Nemo project, which will monitor the efficacy of drugs for seizures in babies, will use the infrastructure platform to transfer data from all European centres efficiently to a secure database in Cork,” explains Dr Geraldine Boylan of the Neonatal Brain Research Group at UCC.

Plans are also afoot to use the e-Inis/HEAnet platform to provide remote monitoring for sick newborn babies in hospitals across Europe, she adds.

“The investment in research infrastructure has meant that Ireland is now in a position to lead on major EU-funded research projects that require the transfer and storage of large amounts of data.”