The World-Class Data Infrastructure: a fundamental enabler for data-driven innovation
Data innovations could lead to improved visitor experiences during major public events. Edinburgh Festival image: Paul Dodds.
EPCC’s Director Professor Mark Parsons explains why the World-Class Data Infrastructure will help position the City Region as data capital of Europe. The unique thing about the WorldClass Data Infrastructure (WCDI) is not necessarily huge amounts of computing power. For example, we already host a number of the UK’s national supercomputers at EPCC – we’re not short of compute power. What we’re investing in with the WCDI is combining the computing and data resources to create a facility that will allow organisations to innovate. This involves the storage and services to manage and present data to users. We’re proposing to host, manage and deliver datasets and services for many different users. It’s going to be very novel. Certainly in Europe, there aren’t any facilities with as broad a data remit as the WCDI. 4
It will be a fundamental enabler for many data science projects, be they for industry, purely academic, or a mixture. Scotland’s very lucky that it already has EPCC, which is known around the world – and is certainly in the top two or three of European supercomputing centres. But we believe WCDI will facilitate new products, services, and scientific studies by bringing together regional, national and international datasets. For example, Festivals Edinburgh want visitors to come to the city and have a better experience during the many festivals. I hope we can help by using data we store in the WCDI on how people move around the city during the Festival. The data we host will have different governance requirements, from open data up to highly secure data with limited access. Subject to permission from the data owners and following robust governance processes, one of the key things we’ll be able to do is take different datasets and link them together to
Mark Parsons EPCC Director m.parsons@epcc.ed.ac.uk
The University of Edinburgh is set to play a key role in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal, delivering the deal’s Data-Driven Innovation programme. Underpinning new data innovation hubs across the University will be an exciting new facility for the secure and trustworthy hosting and analysis of huge and varied datasets.
