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

1 Registration and Refreshments

2 Welcome and Conference Aims

Speakers: Jonathan Hays (Queen Mary), Sadaf Alam

3 Guest Speaker: DSIT/UKRI DRI update

4 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)

5 Towards a common data infrastructure for laboratory science

Speaker: Laura Shemilt (Rosalind Franklin Institute)

6 Surveying accessibility of federated compute for junior researchers

Speaker: Gordon Yip (Kings College London)

7 Identifying barriers for biology researchers using federated HPC services

Speaker: Wahab Kawafi (University of Bristol)

8 Federated data access across the DRI

Speaker: Alastair Basden (Durham university)

9 Evaluation of Secure Federated Kubernetes Storage for Trusted Research Environments

Speaker: Wojciech Turek (University of Cambridge)

10 Lunch

11 DRI Federation Cybersecurity Roadmap development

Speaker: David Crooks (STFC)

12 Supercomputers and superpositions: making quantum accelerators accessible within HPC frameworks

Speaker: Omar Rathore

13 Job orchestration using Constellation on heterogenous HPC resources

Speaker: Mark Wilkinson

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

Speaker: Konstantinos Zachariadis

15 Tokenised authentication for research computing services

Speaker: Phil Cass

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

Speaker: Greg Warren

17 A federated bespoke AI-assisted helpdesk for DRI facilities

Speaker: Fawada Qaiser

18 Table discussions to generate questions for the Second Phase Project PIs

19 Refreshment break

20 2nd Call Project Panel Discussion

21 AIRRPORTAL

Speaker: Sadaf Alam

22 ELixIR Science and Data Platforms

Speaker: Peter MacCallum

23 FRIDGE project: Federated research infrastructure by data governance extension ~ trusted research environments on UK AI research resources

Speaker: Martin O'Reilly

24 Questions for the panel

25 Museum and Exhibits Tour

26 Dinner at Harbour House

Friday 27 February

27 Registration and Refreshments

28 The Roadmap structure and Interim Report

Speakers: Jeremy Yates, Kieran Leach

29 International perspectives: EuroHPC

Speaker: Alberto Lanzanova

30 International perspectives: The EGI Foundation

Speaker: Matthew Viljoen (EGI)

31 International Perspectives Q&A

32 Refreshments and Posters

33 ACCoRD; A Community for Contract Regulation for Data

Speakers: Claire Ellul, Katie Buntic

34 Federated Edge: HPC architectures for AI workflows in privacy-sensitive and real-time domains

Speaker: Theo Spyridopoulos

35 Federated Data Movement

Speaker: Alastair Basden

36 Federated IAM for existing infrastructures

Speaker: Stephen Booth

37 Panel Q&A

38 Lunch & Project Posters

39 Federated but UNITED: Exploring user needs and community building in the environmental domain

Speaker: Poppy Townsend (STFC)

40 Inclusive Futures: User stories and mapping pathways for NFCS

Speaker: Allison Littlejohn (UCL)

41 Bridging the Gap

Speaker: Laura Crawford

42 Federation of compute and infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities

Speaker: Karina Rodriguez

43 Enhancing HPC adoption through user-centred design

Speaker: Tariq Umar

44 Panel Q&A

45 Conference Evaluation, Summary and Close