£4.2million grant awarded to Software Sustainability Institute

A team of academics and software engineers based at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and led by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, will work in partnership with the research community to manage software beyond the lifetime of its original funding, so that it is strengthened, adapted and customised to maximise its value to future generations of researchers. Neil Chue Hong, director of the SSI and OMII-UK, said: "The issue at the moment is that there are no co-ordinated ways of sustaining important research software once it comes to the end of its funding. Some software gets abandoned when the project ends. Some systems are maintained in pockets on very much a best-effort basis rather than on the basis of any longer term strategy." Hong and his collaborators will work with 30 to 40 groups across the UK, providing advice on how to create self-sustaining communities of researchers around important software. According to Hong, it is these communities that will ensure the software's future by keeping it up to date and developing it to meet new requirements. Early projects will encompass climate change, nuclear fusion and medical imaging. The SSI says it will collaborate with key researchers to identify and shape the software which is considered by its community to be the most important for research. Strategies for sustaining software will be optimised, and the best methods will be communicated to researchers through SSI consultancy. According to the SSI, this work will help to stop the decay of software. Hong added: "The creation of the SSI will ensure that important software is sustained so that it can continue to contribute towards high quality research."