SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL (STFC)
- Profile: STFC is one of seven research councils in the UK. Formally under the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills, its role is to provide large scale research facilities for other research councils, universities, and industry, as well as managing the UK’s subscriptions to large international research facilities such as CERN, and funding about 900 PhD students and other relevant projects. STFC’s own research facilities include neutron spallation sources, high powered lasers, a space science department, and a department for scientific computing (SCD) which also supports the Hartree supercomputing centre. It is the SCD which will be contributing to mF2C.Having been co-founder and part of what is now known as IGTF (www.igtf.net) since its inception in 2001, STFC brings experience and skills in designing and building large scale security infrastructures. Relevant recent activities include practical use and development of federated identity management from OIDC and Shibboleth to Moonshot (IETF-ABFAB), securely linking mobile to high performance computing, investigating IoT prototype security, with a focus on practical applications for science.SCD has a lot of experiences with data models supporting a wide range of research. Data covers public data which must be open (possibly after an embargo period), discoverable, reusable, and citeable;
- data which must be archived and preserved “forever” ;
- and data with protection requirements because it arises from industry tasks (e.g. pharmaceutical), or it is sensitive.
While solving computational challenges from industry, the Hartree supercompting centre also researches “green computing” via low power devices – these could be FPGAs (which are also used in instruments built by STFC as level zero triggers, due to their high speed processing capacity), or Intel Atom and ARM processors, or even PICs, etc. While the focus of this research is green computing, it could also usefully feed into edge devices more generally, many of which have energy or computational restrictions.
- Project Role: STFC will be leading tasks 2.2 (security constraints and requirements), and 3.1 (security aspects for the mF2C Controller block components)
- Contact points:
Referer Email Jens Jensen jens.jensen@stfc.ac.uk - Country: United Kingdom
Links: STFC website