The Science and Technology Facilities Council is one of Europe's largest multidisciplinary research organizations supporting scientists and engineers world-wide. It operates world-class large-scale research facilities, and manages international research projects in support of a broad cross-section of the UK research community.

Science and Technology Facilities Council Computational and Visualization Facilities

The Laboratory hosts the HPCx system. The Science and Technology Facilities Council e-Science Centre is playing a vital role in the successful exploitation of the next generation of powerful scientific facilities operated by Science and Technology Facilities Council on behalf of the UK research community, and to the UK's effective use of major facilities elsewhere. In addition, the Science and Technology Facilities Council e-Science Centre is home to the UK National Grid Support Centre which supports the UK core e-Science Programme. These computational facilities are to be supplemented with high-end visualization servers, based both on shared memory and distributed cluster architectures. Commercial, public domain and in-house visualization software to deliver advanced visualization to desktop systems consisting of commodity processors and graphics cards.

Visualization for data analysis on the Grid

Visualization expertise and activities within the Science and Technology Facilities Council e-Science Centre has strong applications focus, delivering advanced visualization solutions for very large datasets (in excess of 20GB a step) for real-world applications in science and engineering with focus on scalability requirements on visualization. Grid-enabled implementations of visualization algorithms are implemented on the National Grid Service (NGS)to achieve scalability and a uniform Services based interfaces and GSI security are used for secure remote access. Science and Technology Facilities Council’s expertise is also in delivering these advanced visualization solutions to desktop problem solving environments such as Matlab, IRIX Explorer, used on desktop systems with commodity processors and graphics cards.

RAL is leading the visualization and interactive services along with Leeds in the EPSRC funded Integrative Biology project and is a partner in the NERC funded GODIVA project. The OST funded eVe project has developed a production grid for visualization and data analysis for material science simulation and fitting of experimental data. Expertise is also in the development of advanced high resolution image processing, visualization with real-time manipulation of biological systems integrated into a variety of third-party systems.