Imperial finds partners

Imperial has partnered with Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Southampton to form a new consortium named Science and Engineering South Consortium (SES-5). The idea is to innovate and explore new ideas through collaboration. The SES-5 have a combined annual research spend of over £1.3 billion. Together they hold a substantial amount of the research awards. The universities involved are five of the six top research powers in the UK.

Professor David Price, Vice-Provost for Research at UCL said: “Our institutions are committed to the concept that competition between ideas and hypotheses is essential for the healthy development of excellent and impactful research.” He said that the group are “convinced of the value to the UK and beyond of collaboration and the sharing of insights and resources”. Professor Ian Walmsley, Oxford’s Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research said: “The SES-5 will be well-placed both to compete and to collaborate with other world-class institutions on the global stage.”

The SES-5 will aim to share infrastructure and collaborate to become better. There is already a project underway to share facilities for High Performance Computing. Donal Bradley, Pro-Rector for Research at Imperial College London said: “It is vital that we maintain our pre-eminence in research and careful planning of our infrastructure is essential if we are to maintain a leading international position”.

The SES-5 have been accused of “ganging up” on the rest of the university sector. Philip Nelson, pro Vice-Chancellor for research at Southampton said that they were not “ganging up on the rest of the sector” and trying to “run off with the loot”. This is the latest alliance to be announced, with others including the N8 group of northern English universities in 2007. The south-western GW4 alliance and the Midlands-based M5 group.

Imperial partners up for PRiME Chip Research Project

Imperial College London has partnered with Southampton, Manchester and Newcastle have partnered to develop more efficient computer architectures in a five-year £5.6m PRiME (Power-efficient Reliable many-core Embedded systems) project.

The venture will be funded by a grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).