Academics and software engineers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, and Southampton have established the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), which will partner with about 30 to 40 research communities across the United Kingdom to develop ways to keep their software current and to help them develop it to meet new requirements. SSI will optimize strategies for sustaining software and provide communities with best practices for improving it for future users. “The issue at the moment is that there are no coordinated ways of sustaining important research software once it comes to the end of its funding,” says SSI director Neil Chue Hong. “The creation of the SSI will ensure that important software is sustained so that it can continue to contribute towards high quality research.”
View Full Article
For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com

ETH Zurich scientists working on the FuturIcT project plan to use the world’s largest supercomputers to simulate life on Earth, including the financial system, economies, and whole societies. The ETH researchers, working under the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, are analyzing huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as communication networks or the Internet. The FutureIcT project aims to bring different kinds of research together to simulate the entire globe, including the diverse interactions of social systems and of the economy with the environment. The FutureIcT project also aims to analyze data on social, economic, and environmental processes by augmenting the results of field studies and laboratory experiments. “Such observatories would detect advance warning signs of many different kinds of emerging problems, including large-scale congestion, financial instabilities, the spreading of diseases, environmental change, resource shortages, and social conflicts,” says ETH’s Dirk Helbing.
View Full Article

For More Information Visit: http://www.cpccci.com