The e-Infrastructure South consortium comprises four of the UK's leading Universities in the area of high-performance computing (HPC) who, collaborating with the e-Science Centre at RAL, will create this new regional Centre of Innovation. The five partners in the Centre are the University of Bristol, the University College London, the University of Southampton, the University of Oxford, and the STFC: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

The Centre for Innovation will provide a shared infrastructure for the development of data driven applications, simulation and software; science and enterprise drivers for the continuing development of that infrastructure and software; a training centre to create the next generation scientists, engineers, social scientists and other research computing practitioners and to maintain a skilled workforce. It will offer both traditional large-scale high-performance computing capacity and leading-edge GPU-based facilities.

Through the Centre of Innovation, e-Infrastructure South will stimulate new academic-industrial collaborations, creating new opportunities for economic growth and enabling advances in science and engineering. The creation of a regional computational facility opens opportunities for innovation and collaboration that would be difficult to deliver through existing facilities and with the existing disparate knowledge base.

The Centre will support research partnerships that will allow industrial and academic investigation and exploitation in the existing research areas of:

- Modelling the Earth's Climate, oceans and atmosphere, and the atmospheres of other planets.
- Epidemiological analysis of large datasets to understand the efficacy of drug regimes.
- Modelling and imaging of multi-scale interactions (e.g. how does a cell/organ work at the molecular/cellular level) in biological systems and drug transport through membranes.
- Mapping medical conditions in the general populations to catalogues, such as the human genome.
- Complex engineering systems, such as aircraft and ships, fluid flow and turbulence.
- Simulating 3G & 4G communications networks.
- Development of nanotechnologies for fuel cells and new pharmaceuticals, and to design and test new industrial processes.
- Understanding transportation and informing policy through social simulation.
- Innovating in energy systems, developing new modes of energy and the management thereof.
- Understanding, modelling and visualizing causality.
- Discovery of new drugs by molecular modelling techniques.
- Development of new tools for the processing and management of medical images.

Potential Impact:
The Centre will have direct socio and economic impact through:

- a collaborative approach to industry and academic provision for data intensive research and simulation
- the continuing up-skilling of the workforce
- increased capability of simulation on social, scientific and engineering challenges
- new technology and capability to deal with the tsunami of data that faces researchers, businesses and government alike.

The computational and data demands on academia and industry alike are every increasing however it is often highly impractical and uneconomic for institutions and organisations to build the required e-Infrastructure. The Centre for Innovation will provide that infrastructure, in terms of facilities, software and skills support. It will also provide a template for other UK regional e-infrastructure and will work to increase the UK's international profile. The provision of multiple systems that offer Tier 2 capability within the region will allow new science through existing software, migration of existing software to next generation systems, and development of new many-core algorithms to allow sustainability of codes on future generation systems.

The consortium will initially benefit the following primary sectors: 1) Aerospace, Aviation, Marine and Maritime, 2) Advanced materials, 3) Engineering and 4) Biosciences. These four sectors are best placed to take early advantage of new regional HPC facilities. Candidates for additional sectors include the creative industries and financial services. The e-Infrastructure consortium industrial collaborators include technology companies, IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, Fujitsu, Microsoft, Gnodal and NAG Ltd and industry partners reliant on such research infrastructure such as Rolls Royce, Johnson Matthey, BAE Systems, EDF, Lang O'Rourke, Airbus, GSK, AstraZeneca Pfizer, Willis Re, AgustaWestland and Boeing. The industry partners will benefit from access to both the large conventional system at Southampton and the GPU-based system at RAL.