NFCS NetworkPlus Spring Conference

26 Feb 2026, 10:00 → 27 Feb 2026, 16:00 Europe/London

Bristol

The NFCS NetworkPlus 3rd National Conference will bring together all 26 project partners to review the initial Federation Roadmap findings from the 13 first phase projects and to hear what the 13 second phase projects expect to contribute as they begin their work.

In addition to interim reporting at the halfway stage to the NFCS Roadmap, the conference has invited guest speakers to present insight on their experiences in planning, developing and managing DRI federation both nationally and internationally across a several areas of research.

The event will be held in a distinctively different venue; MShed is Bristol’s museum which showcases its technological, mercantile and social histories over the last 600 years.

Building on the successfully broad and inclusive Autumn conference in Edinburgh we expect an even better forum to enable the sharing and sharpening of ideas of how to plan the building and operation of our national federated compute service to enhance the UK's digital research infrastructure.

Spring Conference Programme - 26-27 Feb '26.docx

Thursday 26 February

10:30 → 11:00 Registration and Refreshments

11:00 → 11:10 Welcome and Conference Aims

Speakers: Jonathan Hays (Queen Mary), Sadaf Alam

11:10 → 11:30 Guest Speaker: DSIT/UKRI DRI update

11:30 → 11:40 Net-Zero and Circular Economy Federation: Evidence-based policy roadmap for carbon-aware compute in the built environment

Speaker: Alireza Moghayedi (University of the West of England)

11:40 → 11:50 Towards a common data infrastructure for laboratory science

Speaker: Laura Shemilt (Rosalind Franklin Institute)

11:50 → 12:00 Surveying accessibility of federated compute for junior researchers

Speaker: Gordon Yip (Kings College London)

12:00 → 12:10 Identifying barriers for biology researchers using federated HPC services

Speaker: Wahab Kawafi (University of Bristol)

12:10 → 12:20 Federated data access across the DRI

Speaker: Alastair Basden (Durham university)

12:20 → 12:30 Evaluation of Secure Federated Kubernetes Storage for Trusted Research Environments

Speaker: Wojciech Turek (University of Cambridge)

12:30 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 13:40 DRI Federation Cybersecurity Roadmap development

Speaker: David Crooks (STFC)

13:40 → 13:50 Supercomputers and superpositions: making quantum accelerators accessible within HPC frameworks

Speaker: Omar Rathore

13:50 → 14:00 Job orchestration using Constellation on heterogenous HPC resources

Speaker: Mark Wilkinson

14:00 → 14:10 FAIR-Compute: A roadmap for fair and efficient allocation of federated digital research infrastructure

Speaker: Konstantinos Zachariadis

14:10 → 14:20 Tokenised authentication for research computing services

Speaker: Phil Cass

14:20 → 14:30 Federating everything, everywhere, all at once: Exploring the potential for inclusion of Tier3 services in the UKRI federated DRI

Speaker: Greg Warren

14:30 → 14:40 A federated bespoke AI-assisted helpdesk for DRI facilities

Speaker: Fawada Qaiser

14:40 → 15:00 Table discussions to generate questions for the Second Phase Project PIs

15:00 → 15:20 Refreshment break

15:20 → 15:40 2nd Call Project Panel Discussion

15:40 → 16:05 AIRRPORTAL

Speaker: Sadaf Alam

16:05 → 16:30 ELixIR Science and Data Platforms

Speaker: Peter MacCallum

16:30 → 16:55 FRIDGE project: Federated research infrastructure by data governance extension ~ trusted research environments on UK AI research resources

Speaker: Martin O'Reilly

16:55 → 17:15 Questions for the panel

17:15 → 18:15 Museum and Exhibits Tour

19:00 → 21:00 Dinner at Harbour House

Friday 27 February

09:00 → 09:30 Registration and Refreshments

09:30 → 10:00 The Roadmap structure and Interim Report

Speakers: Jeremy Yates, Kieran Leach

10:00 → 10:20 International perspectives: EuroHPC

Speaker: Alberto Lanzanova

10:20 → 10:40 International perspectives: The EGI Foundation

Speaker: Matthew Viljoen (EGI)

10:40 → 10:50 International Perspectives Q&A

10:50 → 11:20 Refreshments and Posters

11:20 → 11:32 ACCoRD; A Community for Contract Regulation for Data

Speakers: Claire Ellul, Katie Buntic

11:32 → 11:44 Federated Edge: HPC architectures for AI workflows in privacy-sensitive and real-time domains

Speaker: Theo Spyridopoulos

11:44 → 11:56 Federated Data Movement

Speaker: Alastair Basden

11:56 → 12:08 Federated IAM for existing infrastructures

Speaker: Stephen Booth

12:08 → 12:20 Panel Q&A

12:20 → 13:20 Lunch & Project Posters

13:20 → 13:32 Federated but UNITED: Exploring user needs and community building in the environmental domain

Speaker: Poppy Townsend (STFC)

13:32 → 13:44 Inclusive Futures: User stories and mapping pathways for NFCS

Speaker: Allison Littlejohn (UCL)

13:44 → 13:56 Bridging the Gap

Speaker: Laura Crawford

13:56 → 14:08 Federation of compute and infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities

Speaker: Karina Rodriguez

14:08 → 14:20 Enhancing HPC adoption through user-centred design

Speaker: Tariq Umar

14:20 → 14:45 Panel Q&A

14:45 → 15:00 Conference Evaluation, Summary and Close