In December 2024, funding was awarded to develop and proliferate the Collaborative Computational Project (CCP) model across research communities within UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), creating a strong and stable landscape of communities to support the concept of research computing software as an infrastructure.  

This funding was made available via STFC from UKRI’s Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) programme and is curated by CoSeC. The purpose of the funding was to enable community scoping to identify and define viable new CCPs that can be incorporated into the existing and rich community landscape, expanding its overall research remit and the reach of the collaborations it can provide.  

As a result, a total of six new communities joined CoSeC, which represent a significant widening for the existing CCP landscape, both in terms of research domains and coverage across UKRI’s councils. Between them, they cover new UKRI research areas such as Arts and Humanities, Particle Physics and Astronomy, as well as expanding existing research domains. This also aligns with the UKRI DRI vision of an interconnected and centralised approach for the UK in terms of national compute infrastructure. 

The six communities are: 

CCP ParaSols (Particulate Solid Simulations) 

CCP-AHC (Arts, Humanities and Culture) 

CCP-DCM (Data-centric Computational Mechanics) 

CCP-volumeEM (Volume Electron Microscopy – website under development) 

UKNR (Numerical Relativity in the UK) 

CCP-TEPP (Computational Particle Physics Software Development – website under development) 

 A mid-project report has now been completed which is available here, comprised of updates from each community funded as a result of the “Collaborative Computational Communities: towards new CCPs” funding call.  

“The report provides a clear vision for what each community wants to achieve in the long term, with well-defined roadmaps looking forward,” says CoSeC Director Stephen Longshaw. “The next 12 months will be an exciting time for these projects as they bring the technical expertise of CoSeC into their activities.”