The Network for sustainable Digital Research Infrastructure Vision and Expertise (NetDRIVE) has been set up to provide a forum for managers, software engineers, academics and others to come together to build a common vision for a sustainable future and to incite a transition to sustainable working practices in the Digital Research Infrastructure communities.

We are organising an annual meeting of our project on sustainable research computing for UKRI.

The agenda will include keynote presentations to stimulate discussion and breakout sessions in which people can address specific challenges facing the community. This meeting will be an opportunity for the community to meet eight new champions for transformational change who will be joining the project in September. The meeting will also produce recommendations for setting up four key working groups on Ethics and Sustainable Progress, Metrics and Reporting, Sustainability Clauses in Contracts and Conditionalities, and Short Format Online Training.

The meeting will bring together people from many areas of UKRI funded research computing.

18-19 February 2025. NetDRIVE: Priorities and Ethics of Research Computing Investments

This meeting initiated NetDRIVE Stage 2 and addressed the following questions:

• How can we maintain competitive computing capability when we have 10-fold increase per decade in the price of a competitive machine? 
• How do we manage ethical issues around a national compute resource together with associated data? 
• How do we develop the new skills needed both for rapidly advancing technology and evolving sustainability targets? 

The meeting was hosted by Queen Mary University of London, and held at Pathology Museum, St Bartholomew's Hospital West Smithfield. Image of QMUL Westsmithfield Site, by Queen Mary University Of London

The NetDRIVE network invited all interested communities to a two-day workshop focused on inciting and leading transformational change in our research computing culture.

The workshops offered an engaging opportunity to interact with leaders in service delivery, creative thinking, team building, and advocacy to share best practices and innovative ideas to accelerate the delivery of the change we need.

 Presentation Slides from the Edinburgh workshop:

• NetDRIVE Overview Presentation
• Green Software Engineering. Michèle Weiland
• Machine Room and Hardware Theme Sustainability at the Advance Computing Facility (ACF) Paul Clark, Adrian Jackson, Alan Simpson, Lorna Smith, Ritchie Somerville, Andy Turner EPCC, University of Edinburgh