The national E-Science program was launched in November 2000 as a spring board to bring E-Science tools and techniques to the academic research community in the UK. The program refers to E-Science as:

"...the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists."

Funding for the program totalling £98M includes:

• £3M to the ESRC
• £7M to the NERC
• £8M each to the BBSRC and the MRC
• £17M to EPSRC
• £26M to PPARC
• £5M awarded to CLRC to ‘Grid Enable’ their experimental facilities
• £9M towards the purchase of a new Teraflop scale HPC system

In addition £15M has been allocated to the Core e-Science Program, a cross-Council activity to develop and broker generic technology solutions, and generic middleware to enable e-Science and form the basis for new commercial e-business software. This funding has been enhanced by an allocation of a further £20M from the CII Directorate of the DTI, to be matched by a further £15M from industry. The Core e-Science Programme will be managed by EPSRC on behalf of all the Research Councils.

A national E-Science centre has been established in Edinburgh to provide a national service in the research, education and support of E-Science. The centre key focus will be to:

• Lead, coordinate and support the UK program to establish e-Science.
• Become an internationally recognised centre for e-Science research.
• Stimulate the uptake of e-Science techniques and technology in industry and commerce

Regional E-Science Centres

The Southampton Regional e-Science Centre is part of the National e-Science initiative and is the focus for e-Science and Grid based activities at Southampton University. Much of the focus of the Centre will be on problems in the domains of engineering and chemistry but will also span across medicine, physics, arts, etc.

The e-Science Regional Centre for the North West of England (ESNW) is based at the University of Manchester and is developing a particular specialism in BioMedical e-Science.

Oxford Regional e-Science Centre will be focused in the areas of Bioinformatics and Medical imaging with strong support from Physics.

The other regional e-science centres are at Belfast, Cambridge, Cardiff, Imperial College London, CLRC, and Newcastle.

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