Crossing boundaries: computational science, e-Science and global e-Infrastructure.

These two Theme Issues of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A contain selected papers from the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2008, which was held in Edinburgh between 8 and 11 September 2008 (http://www.allhands.org.uk/2008/). The meeting was a major success, attracting a record number of contributions (250) and a very large number of participants (527). One of us (P.V.C.) was delighted to have been able to chair the conference in 2008, under the theme ‘Crossing boundaries: computational science, e-Science and global e-Infrastructure’. The title emphasized the intended interdisciplinarity of the meeting as well as the nature of its principal technical challenges. A major goal of the meeting was to ensure that we realized a good balance between scientific (‘applications’) and computer science aspects of e-Science. (We use the word ‘scientific’ here in the widest sense, embracing digitally enabled activities in the arts and humanities.) To shape the meeting into one which achieved the aims implied by its title, we sought to foster a genuine synergy between computer scientists, computational scientists and researchers in all domains, achievable by facilitating access to, and exploitation of, all kinds of distinct resources across disparate administrative boundaries. The resources required to change the scientific game are extremely heterogeneous—they include software, middleware, computation, data, storage, visualization, networks, information, digital sensors and digital communication— and are geographically widely distributed, generally residing within diverse administrative domains: all need to be made available to users transparently and on demand if e-Science is to have its much heralded impact. The outcome from such an undertaking is clear and substantial: new, faster, better and different science than has been possible before. The conference Programme Committee was comprised in equal measure of scientists and computer scientists (table 1). The Programme Committee played a key role in organizing the meeting but particularly in reviewing the vast number of submitted papers, which took place in two phases: initially, of the papers submitted as extended abstracts to the conference itself, on the basis of which a selection of 54 full contributions was invited; those manuscripts were then subjected to rigorous peer review, leading to the set of 30 articles that are being published in these two back-to-back Theme Issues. Thus, only just over