One of the Centre's key activities is to identify, fund and support high-quality projects with leading industrial and academic partners. Another important function is matchmaking for industrial and academic groups with common interests.

The Centre's activities cover a wide range of fields, but it has particular expertise in data-intensive e-Science.

The NEReSC was established in July 2001, funded by the EPSRC and DTI through the UK Core e-Science programme, to provide expertise in e-Science and to instigate and run a set of industrially focused projects. The aims of the centre are:

• To become a centre of excellence in e-Science
• To initiate and manage a £1m programme of industrially focused projects with matching industrial contributions
• To act as a first point of contact for e-science in the region, for companies and university research groups
• To develop specialist expertise in database-intensive computing on the Grid
• To develop communication, awareness and training activities in e-Science related fields
• To participate in a national Grid of computing/data resources and facilities

The Centre has a core technical team to assist e-Science projects and practitioners with:

• Designing Grid-based systems
• Education & Training
• Support
• Developing common middleware
• Grid system installation, configuration & management

The Centre is part of the School of Computing Science, and is based in the Devonshire building (pictured above), at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the North-East of England (travel directions). Its regional remit includes the whole of the North East, including Tyne and Wear, County Durham, Teesside and Northumberland and extends as far south and west as York, Leeds and Sheffield.

The Centre benefits from extensive contact with leading computing groups based at Newcastle, including the Parallelism, Distributed Systems, Dependability, and Theory Groups.