How RENCI Serves
We bring the latest cyber tools and technologies to bear on pressing problems. We work with scientists who study critical issues from climate change to the causes of cancer. We form research teams that involve faculty members at universities across North Carolina and the U.S. and that are positioned to bring major research projects to North Carolina. We partner with North Carolina government agencies so they are able to better serve the state’s citizens.
Fact Sheet: RENCI statewide impact (Download pdf)
Fact Sheet: RENCI campus impact (Download pdf)
RENCI’s History of Collaboration
RENCI was launched in 2004 as collaborative institute involving the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University. We develop collaborations that combined the expertise and resources of these three world-class universities and North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park area. We have expanded our collaborations and now comprise a virtual organization that includes the three Triangle area campuses and East Carolina University, UNC Asheville, UNC Charlotte and UNC’s Coastal Studies Institute.
Mission
RENCI develops and deploys advanced technologies to enable research discoveries and practical innovations. RENCI partners with researchers, policy makers, and technology leaders to engage and solve the challenging problems that affect North Carolina, our nation and the world.
Cyberinfrastructure driven by the needs of science and society
Our cyber technology experts build software tools, create visualizations, and employ powerful data management systems, networks, and computing systems to address problems in health and medicine, weather impacts and disaster management, and energy innovation. All our cyberinfrastructure development is done with partners: faculty and units at North Carolina universities, research universities across the U.S., state and federal agencies and industry leaders.
The science of cyberinfrastructure
Everything we learn by applying cyber technologies to problems in turn helps us push the development of better technologies to enable research and innovation. We believe this science of cyberinfrastructure is essential to continuing scientific discovery and innovation.
RENCI Vision
RENCI strives to become the leader in research and development in the diverse cyber technologies that power scientific discovery and business innovation, a niche we call the science of cyberinfrastructure. Everyone at RENCI works to establish the institute as a preeminent national center for this work—a partner sought after by the major institutions seeking to solve multidisciplinary problems that require advanced and integrated cyber technologies to identify root causes and to design practical solutions.
RENCI Guiding Principles
1. Necessity: We believe that cyberinfrastructure—including high performance, high throughput and multicore computing, data systems, information visualization, high performance networking and networked collaboration tools—are essential components of 21st-century scientific discovery and sustainable economic growth. We aggressively develop ever more powerful, comprehensive, and integrated cyber technologies.
2. Collaboration: We believe all research and problem solving in the 21st century requires collaboration across fields of expertise and institutions. We work to build partnerships across the universities in North Carolina, to other universities, public agencies and the private sector. Our efforts strengthen North Carolina’s universities by helping them take on problems they could not effectively address in isolation.
3. Advancement: We are committed to advancing the science of cyberinfrastructure to better serve researchers and the state of North Carolina. Real people working on real problems use the tools we create and deploy, and what we learn from those successes feeds back into our own research, helping us develop the next generation of cyber technologies.
4. Inclusivity: We believe that advanced cyber tools and technologies must be accessible to all and we work to ensure that our communities of users represent the diversity of thought and backgrounds in North Carolina, the U.S. and the world. We believe that cyber technologies in the hands of a wide scope of people—artists, educators, humanists, scientists, entrepreneurs and audiences who have been underserved in the past—will empower creativity, discovery and innovation beyond what we can imagine today.
