NEC C&C Research Laboratories, NEC Europe Ltd. (“CCRLE”) is a dependent branch office of NEC Europe Ltd., UK. CCRLE is the European research lab of NEC’s corporate R&D group and is active in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC) software technologies and applications. CCRLE contributes to both NEC corporate research and product developments; many of the activities are embedded within collaborations with external research groups and European Commission-funded research projects. The primary focus of CCRLE’s current Grid activities is on the development of prototypes, test-beds and technologies for Service Grids (both for compute and data-access services). This is exemplified by the FP5 project GEMSS, coordinated by CCRLE, which is employing base technologies suitable for subsequent service provision to the medical user community. Current activities related to Pharmaceutical applications focus on collaborations between CCRLE, Fraunhofer/SCAI and the NEC Fundamental Research Lab., Japan in the area of in silico simulation based screening for drug design. A further collaboration is looking at the use of Grid middleware to enable the software and related databases used with the docking-molecular mechanics codes for screening to be distributed across sites – the test-bed being systems at CCRLE and Fraunhofer/SCAI.

CCRLE will be contributing to the Pharma Activity in SIMDAT and will be involved in the development of the ontology-based application broker as well as security for dynamic access control. Within the former task CCRLE will apply lessons learned from the GEMSS project to the development of service brokers in the area of Pharmaceutical applications. In doing so, it will expand upon previous work to include semantic based service descriptions. Within the latter area, CCRLE will be developing the secure protocols which will enable working groups to have dynamic access to the objects available on the federated databases.

NEC CCRLE website