Frequently Asked Questions



1. What is e-science?

e-Science originally referred to experiments that connected together a few powerful computers located at different sites and, later, a very large number of modest PCs across the world in order to undertake enormous calculations or process huge amounts of data. The coordination of geographically dispersed computing and data resources has become known as the Grid. This is shorthand for the emerging standards and technology – hardware and software – being developed to enable and simplify the sharing of resources. The analogy is an electric power grid, which comprises numerous varied resources connected together to contribute power into a shared pool that users can easily access when they need it.

What is exciting about the Grid is that the combination of extensive connectivity, massive computer power and vast quantities of digitised data – all three of which are still rapidly expanding – making possible new applications that are orders of magnitude more potent than even a few years ago.

The term 'e-research' is sometimes used instead of 'e-science', with the advantage that gives more emphasis to the end result of better, richer, faster or new research results, rather than the technologies used to get them.

2. What is e-social science?

The notion of e-science nowadays stresses the collaborations made possible by the Grid. 'e-Social Science' is a term used to describe collaborations between computer scientists and social scientists. The aim is that the computer scientists design and develop what is known as middleware – the software that makes sharing easy for non-experts – in order to address the social scientists' substantive research problems. The Grid infrastructure is designed to permit routine sharing of distributed and heterogeneous computational and data resources as well as supporting effective collaboration between groups of scientists.

3. Why should I be interested in e-social science?

Improved access

e-Social Science isn't just for computer scientists. Many social scientists already use grid technology without realising it. For example, you might use JANET, which is a grid used by UK universities to share information and access on-line resources.

Better collaboration across different sites

A growing network of access grids is being used to improve collaboration between researchers and projects based in organisations across the UK and beyond. Access grids have all the functionality of videoconferencing, but with greatly improved audiovisual quality and the capacity to link a range of sites and project numerous screens and powerpoint presentations across a whole wall. Access grids save valuable time and money by allowing researchers to have regular 'virtual meetings'.

Link data for richer results

One of the most exciting areas of e-social science is the possibility to automatically and seamlessly link data resources from different sources and in different formats. For example, a current e-social science pilot demonstrator project ( FINGRID ) is linking real-time quantitative financial data with qualitative data in the form of political and economic news, to give a continuous stream of information which maps national and international events onto the UK financial markets, and vice versa.

Save Time

Grid technologies can save time through better, more comprehensive cataloguing of data, Single Sign On to data resources, and faster processing of computationally-intensive research outputs.

4. What funding is available?

Our news page will list any relevant details of any current calls. You can keep up to date via the RSS feed. The ESRC website also lists current, relevant calls.

5. Can I use the grid from my 3 year old computer?

Probably (though we're not promising!). The supercomputers doing all the hard work of processing the data are extremely high-powered, but your computer only needs to connect to the grid application familiar web browser-based tools. For the user, this can be like using a large database-driven website, like Amazon; the site holds vast amounts of information, but the visitor accesses it through a user-friendly web interface.