The DAFNI (Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure) Team based at Scientific Computing Department at Science, Technology Facilities Council (STFC), together with the Universities of Oxford and Newcastle, has just completed a very successful week-long ‘Hackathon’ to explore the DAFNI project’s system design and explore potential modelling and visualisation capabilities.
DAFNI, which is currently being built at STFC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), is a powerful computer system which will revolutionise the UK’s ability to plan for extreme events – such as flooding or power outages – as well as providing a framework for essential services such as energy, transport and digital communications.
The purpose of the Hackathon was to combine two lots of data, one containing Transport information and the other containing information about Energy to produce a set of results, for example to investigate the demand electric cars will have on energy needs.
A lot was gained for the team meeting up and working together to decide on the best software to use. Sam Chorlton, DAFNI Technical Architect said about the Hackathon “it was a real opportunity to investigate some of the possibilities of a system like DAFNI and allowed the team to work on engineering solutions required to connect two separate models.”.
DAFNI Version 1.0 will be showcased at a key event in London mid-June 2019.
Oxford University’s Professor Jim Hall, Chair of DAFNI’s Board of Governance attended on the last day of the Hackathon to review the work. He was really pleased to see the results achieved by the team. He said, “DAFNI has indeed reached a milestone in its development and I am delighted to see how well the team are working together”.
DAFNI is an £8 million project funded as part of EPSRC’s investment in the UK Collaboratorium on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC). DAFNI is being commissioned by Oxford University on behalf of UKCRIC and is being delivered by the Scientific Computing Department at RAL. The aim is to provide data intensive hardware and software enabling advances in research, modelling and visualisation capabilities for infrastructure research. The DAFNI system will be the first of its kind in the World and will provide a centralised point for infrastructure research and data access.