Agenda-setting Fellows: High Performance Computing

**The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) - Head Office**

**Salary**:You will remain on your current salary
**Hours**: Part time (2.5 days a week)
**Contract Type**: Fixed Term Secondment (9 months)
**Location**: Polaris House, Swindon, Wiltshire.

NERC have launched a new scheme to embed high-quality scientific expertise and advice into our work and to support future commissioning and research opportunities. We will second up to three _Agenda-Setting Fellows_ each year, in areas of strategic and/or scientific need.

The Fellowship offers an individual the opportunity to help NERC shape the future direction of an important area of environmental science policy or investment. It is intended that it will help the Fellow develop insight into how a research funder operates, enable them to build their network across the UKRI landscape, and build experience of leading a programme of policy-oriented work in a complex funding landscape.

The need for _Agenda Setting Fellows_ has been identified in areas of strategic need or opportunity for NERC, and it is expected that the fellows’ activities will address these areas (details below). Within this area, it is expected that the fellow will lead the design and delivery of their programme of work, in collaboration with colleagues within NERC and external stakeholders.

The Fellowships are intended to:

- Build knowledge and intelligence within NERC in areas of strategic importance;
- Develop robust evidence to underpin our current and future activities;
- Deepen our relationship with the community (including researchers and wider stakeholders) by embedding expertise within NERC policy making.Large scale computing, such as that supported by NERC-UKRI, enables environmental scientists to perform complex calculations or simulations to conduct research that increasingly pushes the frontiers of science and innovation. The compute needs of the environmental science community are constantly evolving due to the increasing size and complexity of data sets and models, and the evolution of contemporary data science. Furthermore, new compute architectures and technologies, including exascale and pre-exascale systems, and the new software required to use them, have the potential to open up new approaches to environmental science.

Within this changing context, the NERC Digital Environment, Infrastructure and Data (DEID) team wish to develop our understanding and evidence base of the needs and opportunities over the coming decade for compute to support UK environmental science. This will then enable NERC-UKRI to explore how these needs might be supported.

This Fellowship will focus on developing understanding of NERC and the environmental science community’s needs in the area of large-scale computing, including hardware, software, and algorithms. The Fellow will help to ensure that the full breadth of the environmental science community can maximise the value of the existing NERC-UKRI large scale computing portfolio, while collecting evidence to advocate for future computational support for environmental science at NERC, UKRI, national, and international levels. The Fellow will work closely with existing advisory structures, the NERC DEID team and colleagues across UKRI to set out this strategic approach.

The Fellow will be expected to:

- **Conduct a review of the current landscape**:To help NERC achieve the ambitions set out in the Digital Strategy, the fellow will engage the NERC community to understand the current UK and international landscape of compute, including software, hardware, and algorithms, available to environmental scientists. In doing so the fellow will produce a report that identifies potential gaps and opportunities in the NERC portfolio.
- **Develop and document an evidence base **to build an effective picture of environmental science computational needs and opportunities. This could include but is not limited to:

- Demand and usage of infrastructures
- Changing technical and software needs of environmental science
- Opportunities for collaboration with existing infrastructures
- The need for professional skills to underpin effective compute use and development
- The potential science case for new compute technologies and algorithms such as GPUs and exascale to transform environmental science

Assist NERC in developing a forward-looking strategy: using the evidence gathered, the fellow will provide recommendations to NERC to inform and develop a strategic plan for the next decade for the compute needs and opportunities of the environmental science community and potential recommendations for NERC-UKRI’s role in delivering them. This plan will encompass both the pioneering computation and the resource and capability aspects.
- Relevant expertise: demonstrable understanding of and experience of working in the area of strategic need on which the fellowship focusses
- Strategic thinking: evidence of the ability to take a strategic overview of an area