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Further reading □ Overview1981-821985-861986-871988-891990-91 □ Index of issues □ Index
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Further reading

Overview
1981-82
1985-86
1986-87
1988-89
1990-91
Index of issues
Index

1985-1986

Central Computing

New arrangements for managing SERC computing facilities came into effect at the beginning of 1985-86 following the acceptance by Council of the recommendations of a Working Party of the Central Computing Committee. Under these arrangements, some of the activities that had been controlled centrally were devolved to individual Boards. In particular the Interactive Computing Facility and the Single User System programme are now controlled Engineering Board, and the mainframe computing service at Daresbury Laboratory by Science Board.

Two items have not been so devolved: the SERC computing infrastructure and networking and the operation of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory mainframe computing service. Both are used to various extents by all Boards of Council. The former is now funded directly by Council. The latter is funded by charging Boards for usage. There have been no major changes in the nature and scale of these two items in the past year. This first year of charging for the mainframe service introduced new ways of working and has been largely successful in sense that about 90 percent of the target funding has been recovered from usage charges. This has covered all the recurrent operating costs of the service plus a large fraction, though not all, of the funding required to offset depreciation on installed equipment and to provide for planned developments.

Advanced research computing

At the end of 1984 the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, the Computer Board and the University Grants Committee commissioned a report Future Facilities for Advanced Research Computing. The report found that there were major opportunities for advancing knowledge by computational methods in almost every branch of science and engineering. In effect the greatly increased computing power offered present day supercomputers has opened up a new dimension to the experimental method in scientific investigation by making possible the simulation of complex physical systems to an accuracy that was unattainable on earlier generations of computers. Such simulations can contribute to understanding in fields as diverse as aircraft design, the evolution of galaxies, the chemical reactions of molecules, the physics of liquids and solids, large-scale integrated circuit design, the circulation of oceans and atmospheres and the design of new pharmaceutical products.

The report recommended that there should be a national strategy to cover the provision and support of computing facilities that would enable work of this type to be done. In February 1986 the Advisory Board for the Research Councils agreed to proceed with the purchase of the most powerful proven commercially available computer, a Cray X-MP/48. The computer will be housed in the Atlas Centre of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and will be operated by SERC on behalf of the research councils and the universities.

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