Special Issue

The 2005 U.K. e-Science All Hands Meeting was the fourth in the series, but had a markedly different flavour to those that had gone before. The UK e-Science core programme began in 2001, under the leadership of Professor Tony Hey; hence by the 2005 meeting, many of the initial projects had ended and delivered interesting results. These spanned not just the design of the underlying computer infrastructure to support e-science, but often also the application science itself. The breadth of scientific domains had also broadened considerably by 2005. In the early days of grid computing, there was an emphasis on the use of high-performance computing facilities to support large computations—job-based grid computing was the dominant paradigm. However, the U.K. e-science programme invested heavily on applications and infrastructure to support informationdriven science. Areas such as biology were facing a deluge of heterogeneous, complex data, and advances in e-science were not just of academic interest, but were absolutely necessary if the inherent value in this data was to be unlocked. By the 2005 meeting, the results of the first successful projects to achieve this were being published. One key aspect of the U.K. e-Science programme was its focus on collaboration. This was a necessity if advances were to be made: the application scientists had computational needs that were beyond the capabilities of the existing compute infrastructures, whilst computer scientists often had ideas and prototypes, but needed applications to set the requirements and provide a way to evaluate their work. Even within the computing community, collaboration was encouraged, with projects bringing together a set of sub-disciplines that had previously often only had a nodding acquaintance. A typical project might extract data from a set of databases based on some search criteria, combine and analyse the results, compare them against the existing knowledge, and then visualize any promising outputs. This required the collaboration of researchers with a diverse set of skills ranging across databases, data analysis, semantics, text mining, user interfaces and visualization. In this special issue, we have selected eight papers from the 259 submissions to the conference. They were chosen from those judged by the programme committee to be the best submissions, and we have tried to show something of the diversity of the work presented. They therefore span a set of application sciences, while the underlying infrastructure exploits a range of disciplines within computing science. They range from quantitative performance prediction in complex grid systems, through projects engaging school children in biomedical research challenges, to worldwide grid-enabled systems. We now explain why we picked each paper: