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Overview
November 1980
Spring 1981
Autumn 1981
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Autumn 1982
Spring 1983
Summer 1984
April 1985
June 1985
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Autumn 1987
Summer 1988
Autumn 1988
Autumn 1989
Autumn 1992
Summer 1993
Index of issues

Autumn 1988

New management arrangements for information technology

The future support of research in information technology was one of the subjects considered in the White Paper CM278, DTI - the Department for Enterprise published in January 1988. The paper discussed the setting up of national collaborative research programmes, and considered the possibility of using this approach for IT. SERC and the Department of Trade and Industry have now agreed to the establishment of such a programme, not only to follow on from the Alvey programme, established for five years in 1983, but also to cover the majority of the IT research supported by both bodies, including that currently supported by SERC's Information Engineering Committee (IEC). The objective is to establish a unified framework for the support of IT by SERC and DTI across the whole spectrum of research, ranging from fundamental work in universities and polytechnics through collaborative LINK programmes to industry-led activities, often in collaboration with the academic sector.

To oversee the programme, a new joint advisory structure will be established, drawn from academics and industrialists in roughly equal numbers, to advise both SERC and DTI on research strategy and resource allocation and on individual applications for support. On the SERC side, this structure replaces IEC and its subcommittees. Serving the advisory structure will be new joint administrative arrangements which will provide greater coordination between various components of the overall national programme, and between the national programme and European Community activities such as ESPRIT. Furthermore, programme managers are being appointed to work alongside committees within the advisory structure, to encourage the integration of the various programme elements and to direct the more industrially orientated components.

The new framework is due to be in place by Autumn 1988 in time to deal with applications received at the beginning of the 1988/89 session. Traditional academic-only applications for basic or strategic research will be handled in the normal manner, and subject to normal SERC procedures. New procedures are being established for applications involving industrial collaboration. Each collaborative programme will be the subject of a strategy statement, and applications will be assessed in relation to that strategy. In the case of LINK schemes, guidance has been published in respect of various programmes such as Industrial Measurement Systems and Personal Communications. In the case of the topics previously supported under the Alvey programme, three strategy statements have been published for the subjects of Devices, Systems Engineering and Systems Architecture, which will provide the initial guidance for collaborative work. It is intended however that these strategies should be reviewed by the new joint advisory structure with the intention of broadening the programme to areas not previously the subject of collaborative research proposals.

Information Technology Advisory Board

Dr Nigel Horne

Dr Nigel Horne

Dr Nigel Home has been appointed Chairman of the new Information Technology Advisory Board which will advise both SERC and DTI on their policy and funding for information technology and some aspects of telecommunications.

Dr Horne is Main Board Director, Technical and Corporate Development of STC plc and a Board Director of ICL. He is currently a member of the ESPRIT Advisory Board of the European Commission and of the National Electronics Council.

Boost for Joint Academic Network

The UK academic community's computer network infrastructure is currently undergoing a major performance upgrade and, as part of this initiative, a significant enhancement of JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork) has recently entered service.

The principal reason for the network performance upgrade is to support the demanding networking requirements of the supercomputer users who require access to the centrally funded super-computing facilities at London and Manchester Universities and at the Atlas Computer Centre at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. This includes the rapid transmission of large amounts of data and advanced styles of access based on the use of workstations. The trunk connections which link four of JANET's eight switching centres - those at London, Manchester, the Atlas Centre and the Daresbury Laboratory - have been upgraded from 48 kilobits per second (kbps) to 256 kbps or 512 kbps.

The four sites are connected in a box configuration by British Telecom Megastream circuits, and GDC multiplexers at each site are used to subdivide the Megastream bandwidth into 256 kbps or 512 kbps channels which provide a fully interconnected configuration with fallback channels which are configured automatically if one of the Megastream connections fails.

A complementary programme of upgrading the site links and local area networks (LANs) is in progress with the intention that all large sites will be connected at 48 kbps or 64 kbps, and smaller sites at 9.6 kbps. The upgrade was introduced with the minimum disruption of service. At present JANET handles about 1000 Mbytes of traffic each day, equivalent to about half a million sides of A4 typescript, and the traffic is doubling each year. This makes JANET one of the most heavily used academic networks in the world and, combined with the fact that it interlinks computers from some 25 different manufacturers, provides the UK academic community with a unique facility to support its research, teaching and administrative activities.

The JANET network links more than 100 sites, including all the universities, the majority of the polytechnics and many research council sites, as well as institutions such as the British, Welsh and Scottish national libraries. At most of the sites, one or more LANs are connected to JANET providing wider access for computers, workstations and terminals connected to the LANs, enabling them to communicate with both on-site and off-site computers and networked services.

A total of more than 1000 computers and 20,000 terminals have access to the network. All computer systems, regardless of type or operating system, use a standard set of non-proprietary protocols called the Coloured Books (soon to be replaced by equivalent ISO standards) and can thus interwork with each other. The Coloured Book protocol architecture has been developed in the UK and supports interactive terminal connections, file transfer, electronic mail and job transfer over interconnected LANs and wide area networks (WANs). The infrastructure is recognised worldwide as a pioneering initiative in open systems communication.

Dr R Cooper, Director of Networking Computer Board for Universities and Research Councils

IBM supercomputing initiative

In February this year, the Council approved the replacement of two ageing IBM-compatible computers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory by a new IBM 3090-200E computer. The main roles of the computer are to meet the continuing needs of mainframe computing of the Boards and other SERC users and to front-end the Joint Research Council's Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer.

The new computer has about the same aggregate conventional computing power as the two older machines but it has a new feature, known as a Vector Facility, which can boost the power of certain types of work. The size of the boost depends on the exact nature of the work; typically a factor two to three might be expected, or more in some circumstances. The 3090-200E was delivered to the Atlas Centre at RAL in April and came into service within a few days.

In May there was an announcement by IBM that the Atlas Centre had been selected to be a participant in the Company's European Supercomputing Initiative. This initiative was launched in November 1987 and its objective is to establish a number of IBM supercomputing facilities in Europe to further the use of supercomputing in the academic sector. Each facility will have an IBM 3090-600E with six Vector Facilities. The supercomputers will be linked to each other and to an equivalent facility in the USA at the Theory Center at Cornell University. The facilities will work with each other, with IBM, and with industrial partners where appropriate to look at potential new supercomputing applications, parallel processing and visualisation techniques. As well as contributing towards equipment, IBM will provide expertise to work in collaboration with staff at the supercomputer facilities on projects of mutual benefit.

It is expected that the 3090-200E at the Atlas Centre will be upgraded to a 3090-600E with six Vector Facilities by Summer 1989. Such a machine will have scalar power greater than the Cray X-MP/48 and peak vector performance of about 70% of the Cray. It will have huge memory facilities which could open up new avenues of research that have been difficult to attempt in the past. It is therefore expected that the enhanced computer will provide a valuable complementary facility to the Cray for the UK academic community. Further information on the services that will be available and the conditions under which they may be used will be announced as the details are settled.

Dr B W Davies, SERC Director of Computing
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