High-Performance Computing and Presentations/Speeches

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.

Do you already have a grid-computing deployment on campus? Or do you have researchers who need to access grid-computing resources from high-performance computing centers around the globe? In this session, you will find out how to configure your CA to issue International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF)-compliant certificates and join over a hundred CAs currently certified under approved IGTF profiles. Hear real-life experiences from SURAgrid, see bridge PKIs in action, and learn how to leverage your campus PKI infrastructure to facilitate access to worldwide grid-computing efforts.

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.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. Higher education IT organizations have become increasingly aware of the need for governance processes that sit above day-to-day management and address strategic alignment and the political realities of satisfying IT's many constituencies. But how should -and do- higher education institutions govern IT? This presentation uses the results of an ECAR study of IT governance to frame an interactive session on how to mix good structural governance practices with practical politics.

How to Cite This Work: Yanosky, Ronald, and John W. McCredie. "IT Governance: Solid Structures and Practical Politics." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

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.

This meeting will provide a forum for discussing IT support for institutional research missions. The two broad categories of concern include support for research administration and IT support for research activities. Research administration support involves pre- and post-award support, interaction with federal grant systems, regulatory compliance, and intellectual property management. Supporting research activities includes centralized versus decentralized approaches, high-performance computing, advanced networking, and informatics, as well as enabling multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional work.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. When Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, came out, Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig said, "This is -- by far -- the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this." This work examines the ways in which information technology permits extensive forms of collaboration that may have transformative consequences for economy and society. Benkler's presentation outlines the characteristics of the networked information economy and the roles of collaboration and commons-based production of information, knowledge, and culture, and it suggests avenues to apply these broad trends to education and education-related policy.

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.