STFC Collaborative Computational Communities: Towards New CCPs

Funding to develop new Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs) for large-scale scientific software development, maintenance and distribution across all UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) communities.

Collaborative Computational Communities: Towards New CCPs is a new funding opportunity administered by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) on behalf of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The aim is to create a new collaborative community, leading to a viable plan for a new Collaborative Computational Project (CCP) in the future. Funding comes from UKRI’s Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) programme and is curated by the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities (CoSeC).

CCPs bring together leading UK expertise in key fields of computational research to tackle large-scale scientific software development, maintenance and distribution. This funding will expand the CCP model across UK research communities, thereby creating a strong and stable landscape of communities to support the concept of research computing software as an infrastructure. The CCP concept of networks of researchers collaborating around software has been demonstrated by three UK research councils in recent decades (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Medical Research Council (MRC)). Through this funding, there is a desire to show that it can be equally powerful across all of UKRI by scoping and developing new viable CCPs that cross boundaries and identify common working themes around computational research and innovation.

The scheme will enable community scoping to identify and define viable new CCPs that can be incorporated into the existing community landscape, thereby expanding its overall research remit and the reach of the collaborations it can provide. Funding will help to develop existing or grow new networks of researchers into a structure that allows them to utilise the CCP model to create a new sustainable and organised approach for the future. The CCP model is a community of researchers that are driven collectively by an area of research and joined together through the research software or associated data used for that. It provides a stable and sustained approach to ensuring that the research software is treated as an infrastructure upon which research outputs are driven.

Funded projects should have the key outputs of: a published roadmap and detailed workplan for the newly proposed community; and a final report presenting an updated roadmap based on outcomes from the workplan for use as the design for a new CCP in the future.

CoSeC supports a team of research technical professionals within STFC’s National Laboratories, with skills available across many of UKRI’s research remits. Communities successful through this funding are expected to engage directly with CoSeC to establish a collaborative working relationship with the centre. This will provide event organisation and coordination, the ability to curate technical training events, and a direct working relationship around the development and maintenance of key research software. Effort from within CoSeC will be provided to a community at no additional cost.