The Computational Science Centre for Research Communities (CoSeC) enables and supports collaborative computational research communities that are funded across UKRI. It has a mission to deliver research software as an infrastructure in order to enable world-class UK Research and Innovation.

The communities are designed using multiple structures, including Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs) and High-End Computing (HEC) Consortia. The Centre is run by UKRI STFC Scientific Computing and is made up of a core Programme Office plus a large team of Research Technical Professionals organised into domain-specific technical teams.

The Centre plays a central role within UKRI’s Digital Research Infrastructure in terms of coordinating and representing the needs of computational researchers, practically this means:  

• Development of theory, algorithms, and research software: This is a key driver for computational communities, resulting in long-term, continued expansion and updating of the UK’s research software capability.
• Landscape scanning and road mapping: Ensuring that the future of computational research technology and approaches are embedded in the plans of the UK’s collaborative computational communities. This includes identifying and championing key aspects of nationally relevant topics such as Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing.
• Maintenance, distribution, license management, dissemination and demonstration of research software.  
• User support and technical training: Including domain-specific support within a community as well as collaborative organisation of wider events such as summer schools, study retreats, or hackathons.
• Porting, optimisation, and benchmarking for HPC and new architectures: as an integral element of UKRI’s DRI, CoSeC and the HEC communities work together to ensure the UK’s research software is fit to best exploit its national computing infrastructure.
• Management of research data: Development of visualisation and workflow management tools, database and curation activities, and verification and validation activities. Ensuring that the principles of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data are fundamental within computational research.
• Embedding environmentally sustainable research software at the core of the UK’s digital research infrastructure.
• Coordination and network development: Working with the community Chairs help to generate nationally important impact and outputs.
• Careers: Working with the communities, refine and champion the Research Technical Professional (RTP) career pathway within the UKRI landscape, creating opportunities both within CoSeC and across the communities and identifying challenges and opportunities related to equality, diversity and inclusion.

The CoSeC team are primarily embedded across STFC’s Scientific Computing department and are based at the Daresbury (Cheshire) and Rutherford Appleton (Oxfordshire) National Laboratories within the UK. Scientific Computing organises itself into thematic teams and CoSeC draws on these across related, relevant fields such as engineering, biology, materials, mathematics, software engineering, data management, and artificial intelligence.  

Contact  

For discussion and further information, please email the CoSeC programme office: cosec@stfc.ac.uk