Oxford e-Research Centre

The Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) works with research units across the whole of Oxford University to enable the use and development of innovative computational and information technology in multidisciplinary collaborations.

With a core staff of researchers, developers and support staff the OeRC operates as a hub for e-Research activities across the University, building a community around e-Research at Oxford. The focus of the OeRC's activities is the development and use of new advances in information technology to allow groups of researchers to tackle problems with increasing scale and complexity, facilitating interdisciplinary research and creating appropriate e-Infrastructure for the support of research.

eRC contains the The Volunteer Computing Group, which exists to undertake projects where the general public may volunteer their computing time to assist scientists with research that requires a lot of computational power. The Seti@Home project is a well-known example of this, and there are many other volunteer computing projects throughout the world covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, many based around BOINC. The group runs ClimatePrediction.net, the world's largest climate forecasting experiment for the 21st producing predictions of the Earth's climate up to 2100 and testing the accuracy of climate models.