High-Performance Computing, Presentations/Speeches, and Cyberinfrastructure

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) has joined the lexicon of broad technology terms university leaders must now understand as they enhance campus competitiveness, innovation, and economic development. This discussion session will cover the campus drivers of CI, why it needs to be part of your long-term investment and strategic planning, and ways to frame CI’s importance when discussing the needs of scholars and researchers. Bring your experiences and thoughts to this lively discussion.

Scientific progress and discovery increasingly hinge upon analysis of a wide variety of data sources. With these datasets growing ever larger and more complex, we are increasingly challenged in the areas of management, preservation, integration, and access to high-level services that facilitate inquiry and hypothesis testing. We are also seeing an increase in geographically distributed resources. For science to advance, we must develop new knowledge-based environments that allow researchers to easily query and analyze vast holdings of diverse, distributed data. NCAR has joined a number of collaborations aimed at addressing critical science and societal challenges, ranging from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the International Polar Year, regional climate modeling, solar-terrestrial science, digital preservation, and more. We will survey these areas, discuss some of the challenges we face in developing effective cyberinfrastructure, and briefly touch on the important migration towards "science gateways" and knowledge-based environments.

Modern cyberinfrastructure (CI) creates a “distributed computer” with resources dispersed in diverse geographic and administrative domains and the network providing the “backplane” for this computer. This session will present major players in research and education CI and will offer an overview of the CI Days program under way to assist campuses in planning and implementing CI.

The CI Days program is being developed in coordination with EDUCAUSE, Internet2, National LambdaRail (NLR), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE). The NSF’s TeraGrid and the DOE’s Open Science Grid build on advanced networking to provide leading-edge collaborative computing infrastructure, Internet2 and NLR provide the enhanced network backplane infrastructure, and the NSF’s International Research Network Connections program offers international extensions. Internet2 also develops middleware tools to enable end users to reliably access CI resources, and EDUCAUSE addresses policy and funding issues involved with implementing and operating CI.

Cyberinfrastructure is revolutionizing the scientific-research landscape and is positioned to similarly revolutionize learning. The challenge for educators is to find an innovative strategy that incorporates the best of traditional pedagogy with new paradigms that reflect our times. This presentation outlines how computation, visualization, storage, and high-speed networks can create novel learning environments.

Presentation at the Fourth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, July 13-15, 2005, New Castle Island, New Hampshire. The potential for IT to take research to new levels depends on our ability to acquire, manipulate, store, render, visualize, archive, and transport unimaginable amounts of data. Realizing this potential also depends on human factors, especially the capacity of researchers from different disciplines to assemble virtually and face-to-face to interpret findings from a variety of perspectives. Ferri manages the new Synthesis Center at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and shares insights about how environments there are being organized to foster dialogue across disciplines.