WASHINGTON, D.C., — Alan Blatecky, the former Deputy Director of  RENCI and Interim Director from December 2007 – September 2009, was named Acting Director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) this week by NSF Director Arden Bement.

Blatecky will lead the OCI while a national search for a permanent OCI head is conducted. He replaces Edward Seidel, who was named NSF’s Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) this week. Seidel has led the OCI since September 2008, but had been serving as the acting head of MPS since last August while Blatecky handled most of the day-to-day responsibilities in the OCI.

Blatecky came to RENCI in 2004, shortly after the institute’s founding. He was involved in much of the work that established RENCI, from recruiting staff to negotiating office space agreements to acquiring computing systems.

Before coming to RENCI he was executive director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and also directed the NSF’s Middleware Initiative, an effort to develop the underlying software foundation needed for a nationwide cyberinfrastructure. In North Carolina, Blatecky was executive director of the North Carolina Networking Initiative and a vice president at the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina, now MCNC.

Blatecky maintains ties to RENCI and to UNC Chapel Hill by serving as a liaison and advisor to RENCI Director Stanley C. Ahalt and UNC Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Tony Waldrop on advanced research and development initiatives.

The NSF OCI coordinates and supports the acquisition, development and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services essential to the conduct of 21st century science and engineering research and education.

The research team will hold appointments in Carolina’s nationally recognized School of Information and Library Science with research space in Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The award-winning research group brings expertise in development of digital data technologies, including open source software that enables sharing of data in collaborative research, publication of data in digital libraries, and preservation of data in persistent archives for use by future generations, along with a research portfolio exceeding $10 million.

“The opportunity to recruit an entire group of active researchers with an international reputation for vision, innovation and accomplishment is rare, perhaps even unprecedented in information and library science,” said Chancellor Holden Thorp. “Their work is closely aligned with the school’s efforts in the areas of digital libraries and archives, databases, institutional repositories, information retrieval and information management. Our students and many others across campus will have an extraordinary opportunity to learn from and collaborate with this world-class research team.”

Research team leaders Reagan Moore, Ph.D.; Richard Marciano, Ph.D.; and Arcot Rajasekar, Ph.D.; are in the process of being appointed as full professors in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS), recognized by U.S. News and World Report magazine as the top school of its kind in the nation. Other members of the DICE group will move to Carolina in the next few months.

“The DICE group will function as a magnet for students and collaborators,” said José-Marie Griffiths, school dean. “The group will help us further extend the research computing infrastructure at UNC that will benefit us all, improve our capacity and capability to conduct larger-scale research projects, while inspiring new generations of students to understand that considerable attention and deliberate effort are needed to ensure both effective and long-term access to information.”

Group members will interact with colleagues in the school and other campus units on academic digital library and preservation research efforts, initially focusing on current collaborations such as the National Archives and Records Administration Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype and the National Science Foundation Software Development for Cyberinfrastructure project, along with others such as the Library of Congress Video Archiving project.

“A major challenge for the next several decades will be managing the enormous amount of digital data we create in science and research,” said Alan Blatecky, RENCI’s interim director. “The DICE group has years of experience and an international reputation for developing innovative systems for managing distributed digital data. This will be a huge advantage for Carolina as the wave of new data rapidly becomes a tsunami. We will have the opportunity to extend our leadership nationally and internationally in managing, sharing, publishing and archiving research data.”

Other potential areas for collaboration include biomedical and health data management, grid computing and cyberinfrastructure with Carolina’s Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute and its recently announced National Institute of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award, visualization of large-scale data sets with the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of computer science and with RENCI, as well as shared institutional repositories and digital library systems with RENCI and the Triangle Research Libraries Network. Additional collaborations in the sciences, social sciences and humanities are expected.

“The DICE group, in collaboration with SILS, will pursue development of undergraduate, master’s and doctoral level courses on data grids and preservation environments,” Moore said. “The opportunity to teach academic courses strongly influenced the decision to move to SILS and UNC. We are also interested in pursuing collaborations for the creation of campus cyberinfrastructure and participating on data management projects in support of education, patient medical records and emergency preparedness.”

For more than 10 years the group’s Storage Research Broker (SRB) data grid has been used by research teams worldwide to automate all aspects of manipulation of large, distributed data files, including discovery, access, retrieval, management, replication, archiving and analysis. DICE most recently developed iRODS, the open source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which introduced user-settable rules that automate complex management policies, helping users tame today’s mushrooming collections of digital data.

The team has worked on national and international projects, providing data management systems for major grid and distributed research projects, including the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository, the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the Geoscience network.

On Thursday (Aug. 29), the DICE group will receive the 2008 J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists during the group’s annual meeting in San Francisco. A society news release said the award honors “an individual, institution or organization that promotes greater public awareness, appreciation or support of archives. The DICE group was selected for its long-time support of and involvement in the archives profession’s work to address the challenges of managing, preserving, and providing access to electronic records.”

School of Information and Library Science Web site: http://sils.unc.edu/
RENCI Web site: http://www.renci.org/
DICE Web site: http://diceresearch.org
iRODS Web site: http://www.irods.org

Contacts:
School of Information and Library Science contact: Wanda Monroe, (919) 962-8366, wmonroe at unc.edu
RENCI contact: Karen Green, (919) 445-9648, kgreen at renci.org
DICE contact: Paul Tooby, (858) 822-3654, ptooby at diceresearch.org
UNC News Services contact: Lisa Katz, (919) 962-2093, lisa_katz at unc.edu

CHAPEL HILL, NC, Nov. 8, 2007–The Renaissance Computing Institute, launched in 2004 to build partnerships and apply advanced technologies to complex, multidisciplinary problems, enters a new stage in December as founder Daniel A. Reed joins Microsoft Research and Deputy Director Alan Blatecky takes the helm as interim director.

Reed will become Microsoft’s director of scalable computing and multicore starting Dec 3. Reed launched RENCI in 2004 after leading the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois from 2000-2003 and the computer science department at Illinois from 1996-2001. He came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003 and currently is Chancellor’s Eminent Professor and senior adviser for strategy and innovation to Chancellor James Moeser. Reed will become chair of RENCI’s external advisory committee.

Reed and Blatecky shepherded RENCI through its start-up phase in 2004–2005, supported by seed money from UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University. In the last two years, Reed has overseen enormous growth and expansion at RENCI, which now employs about 100 professionals at its anchor site in Chapel Hill, the three Research Triangle area campuses and at UNC Asheville, UNC Charlotte and East Carolina University in Greenville. RENCI programs span the arts, humanities and sciences with particular focus on two issues critical to North Carolina:  how to better predict, plan for and mitigate disasters and how to enhance biomedical research and improve health-care delivery.

“I have been an academic and high-performance computing researcher all of my professional life,” said Reed. “However, the chance to affect the future of computing on the largest scale at Microsoft was irresistible, both as a researcher and as a builder of large-scale systems. The transition to multicore–or multiple processors per chip–and the emergence of very large-scale data centers that deliver Web-based services are fundamental changes in computing with deep implications. This technological sea change will reshape computing, research, the economy and our lives for years to come.

“I came to North Carolina with a vision for a multidisciplinary institute that leveraged computing to enrich and empower research and education, support economic development and advance social issues,” he continued. “RENCI is the realization of that dream. I’m proud of our accomplishments and the professional staff who have given their time and talents to develop collaborations that are making a difference in North Carolina. Under Alan’s leadership, RENCI will continue to set the example for how partnerships and innovative technologies can solve important problems.”

Moeser praised Reed’s ability to turn big ideas into reality. “We are grateful for all of Dan’s efforts to successfully launch RENCI and its strategic partnerships with other universities and the state of North Carolina,” he said. “His service in national leadership positions addressing important science and technology issues has also brought an invaluable perspective to our thinking about the research enterprise at the university. We wish Dan the very best in his new pursuits at Microsoft. I am also confident that Alan Blatecky will provide excellent leadership during this transition period.”

Blatecky has long been a key player in developing information technology infrastructure for both North Carolina and the nation. He was executive director of the North Carolina Networking Initiative for three years and a vice president at MCNC (formerly the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina) from 1993-2001. Blatecky was executive director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and directed the National Science Foundation’s National Middleware Initiative, an effort to develop the underlying software foundation needed for a nationwide cyberinfrastructure to support science and research. He serves on the Program Management Board for Enabling Grids for E-Science in Europe and on many advisory committees, including the Long Term Ecological Research project, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network and the International Research Network Connections project. He recently rotated off the Open Grid Forum and Internet2 Applications Strategy Council.

“It has been tremendously exhilarating and satisfying to work with Dan these past four years and to see RENCI grow from an idea into a thriving organization that helps our state address key issues,” said Blatecky. “The next few years will be even more exciting, as RENCI continues to mature and build new partnerships and research projects with government, business and our university communities.”