IRIS – providing a nationally accessible infrastructure for UK science

In many countries around the world, the development of national infrastructures for science either has been implemented or are under serious consideration by governments and funding bodies. Current examples include ARDC in Australia, CANARIE in Canada and MTA Cloud in Hungary. These infrastructures provide access to compute and storage to a wide swathe of user communities and represent a collaboration between users, providers and, in some cases, industry to maximise the impact of the investments made. The UK has embarked on a project called IRIS to develop a sustainable e-infrastructure based on the needs of a diverse set of communities. Building on the success of the UK component of the WLCG and the innovations made, a number of research institutes and universities are working with several research groups to co-design an infrastructure, including support services, which take this to a level applicable to a wider use base. We present the preparatory work leading to the definition of this infrastructure, showing the wide variety of use cases which require to be supported. This leads us to a definition of the hardware and interface requirements needed to meet this diverse set of criteria, and the support posts identified in order to make best use of this facility and sustain it into the future.