The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, leads the $2.7 million, three-year project, named ChoiceNet, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University and the University of Kentucky have roles in the project. The project complements the work of the NSF program, Future Internet Architecture (FIA). FIA’s goal is to stimulate innovative and creative research to explore, design, and evaluate trustworthy future Internet architectures.

ChoiceNet is based on the fundamental idea that enabling user choice in networking services will spur innovation while making the future Internet more economically sustainable. The project will enable user choice in three ways:  by encouraging alternative services that allow users to choose from a range of services, by giving users information on the performances of those services and available alternatives, and by allowing users to ‘vote with their wallet,’ and choose the services and thereby reward superior and innovative services.

The research of the ChoiceNet team members builds on previously funded projects in the now completed NSF Future Internet Design (FIND) program. RENCI and NC State will leverage their previous work on the SILO architecture (Services Integration controL and Optimization) project. That project focused on designing an alternative Internet protocol architecture in which protocol stacks were dynamically composed out of basic services based on their ontological descriptions.

RENCI will receive $480,000 over the three-year grant period, which began Sept. 15.

A new report includes recommendations to help campuses create cyberinfrastructure that allows seamless collaboration and data sharing.

The organizers of a campus bridging workshop held last October in Anaheim, CA, have released a final workshop report that includes recommendations to help campuses create cyberinfrastructure that allows seamless collaboration and data sharing across a campus, across multiple campuses and on the national and international levels.

The report, titled Campus Bridging: Campus Leadership Engagement in Building a Coherent Campus Cyberinfrastructure Workshop Report is available at http://pti.iu.edu/campusbridging/leadership

Patrick Dreher, adjunct professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, visiting scientist at MIT and formerly with RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Chapel Hill) chaired the National Science Foundation workshop and served as editor of the report.  Stan Ahalt, director of RENCI; Guy Almes, Texas A & M University; Michael Mundrane, University of California, Berkeley, Jim Pepin, Clemson University; and Craig Stewart, Indiana University, co-authored the report and served on the workshop organizing committee.

“Effective implementation of campus cyberinfrastructure is essential to solve the complex multidisciplinary problems of the 21st century and it requires a coordinated effort among academic and research institutions, ” said Dreher.  “If we are to use cyberinfrastructure to bridge campuses and universities and connect researchers to each other and to cyber resources, we need the support of senior university administrators.  This workshop provided a forum for senior university administrators to express their views on cyberinfrastructure challenges and opportunities, and to offers their ideas and suggestions about how their institutions’ resources can be bridged.”

The workshop report includes four recommendations to enable campus bridging:

• Campuses should provide their educators and researchers with a seamless, highly capable, and accessible cyberinfrastructure to support collaborative research and education.
• Campuses should develop and deploy cyberinfrastructure master plans in order to identify and plan for the changing research infrastructure needs of faculty and researchers.
• In order to encourage campuses to implement these master plans, the National Science Foundation should fund a study and report on successful campus cyberinfrastructure implementations. This would help to document and disseminate best practices for strategies, governance, financing and deployment of cyberinfrastructure.
• U.S. colleges and universities should include cyberinfrastructure costs in their negotiated facilities and administration rates, which are included as part of grant awards.  The resulting F & A income from grant awards should be used strategically and in support of the campus cyberinfrastructure master plan.

The workshop recommendations were developed using input received during two days of discussion among workshop participants as well as formal presentations. Workshop discussions included an overview of the current state of campus bridging, the role of campus leadership in promoting campus bridging and the challenges and opportunities related to a number of cyberinfrastructure categories, including:

• Coherent computing and data infrastructure
• Digital curation and data services
• Data networking in research cyberinfrastructure
• Cyberinfrastructure support and expertise
• Cyberinfrastructure and administrative computing
• Cyberinfrastructure governance models
• Financial structures in academic research

Thirty-nine leaders from academic institutions across the U.S. attended the Anaheim workshop, which was hosted by the University of Southern California and held in conjunction with the EDUCAUSE annual conference. The NSF provided funding for the workshop and RENCI, Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute and Texas A&M University provided additional support.

The workshop report and recommendations, as well as reports from two other campus bridging workshops were used in developing the final report of the NSF’s Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) Task Force on Campus Bridging.

The Campus Bridging Task Force was one of six established by the NSF in 2009 to investigate long-term cyberinfrastructure issues. Each task force subsequently discussed and generated a final report containing recommendations and ideas for advancing cyberinfrastructure in support of NSF research.  The final reports of all of the six task forces are available on the NSF website.

The four organizations that comprise RENCI at UNC Charlotte have been awarded $300,000 from the National Science Foundation to study how land owners’ decision processes affect forest persistence.

Recognized for their forecasts of growth patterns in the Charlotte Metro region, The four partners in RENCI at UNC Charlotte  –  already recognized for their forecasts of growth patterns in the Charlotte Metro region – are UNC Charlotte Center for Applied GIScience (CAGIS), the UNC Charlotte Infrastructure, Design, Environment and Sustainability Center (IDEAS), the UNC Charlotte Visualization Center (VisCenter), and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. The NSF award will allow researchers with the four groups to use data and modeling techniques developed in their previous work forecasting growth and development to look at why natural areas persist.

The grant was one of  17 awards made to pilot urban research projects and covers a 30-month period beginning Sept. 15.

The project has both basic research and community engagement components. In the basic research component, researchers will build sophisticated models of the factors influencing landowners’ decisions to maintain or develop forested land.  The factors to be explored include economically measurable ones such as land development value, timber harvesting value, and potential carbon trading value, and more intangible ones, such as ecosystem intrinsic value, cultural and human values.  A sampling of landowners with forested lands will be invited to participate in interviews and surveys to elicit data about the relative weight given to various factors in their decision-making.

The community engagement component is intended to ensure that the results of the research will have real-world utility.  It will give regional stakeholder organizations the opportunity to consult with the researchers on what factors to include in the model, how to identify landowners willing to participate, and how the results may be used.

RENCI researchers Ross Meentemeyer (CAGIS), Jean-Claude Thill (IDEAS), and William Ribarsky (VisCenter) are directing the research in collaboration with Chunhua Wang of UNC Charlotte’s department of geography and earth sciences, and Todd BenDor of UNC Chapel Hill’s department of city & regional planning.  Meentemeyer will head the interdisciplinary team and provide landscape ecology and spatial modeling expertise; Thill is a leading urban systems modeler; Ribarsky will focus on visual analytics tools to support the modeling and the landowner surveys;  Wang is an environmental economist; and BenDor is an authority on land use planning and public policy.

The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute will lead the community engagement effort, convening community partner meetings and conducting the landowner interviews and surveys.  Community partners currently include the USDA Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the North Carolina Wildlife Resource Commission, North Carolina State University Forestry Department Extension, Gaston County Cooperative Extension, Catawba Regional Council of Governments, Centralia Council of Governments, Catawba Lands Conservancy, Land Trust for Central North Carolina and Nations Ford Land Trust.

By the grant’s completion, the team hopes to develop a sophisticated model that will give land planners a very valuable and versatile tool with the ability to look into the future and to see with greater clarity the effects of a multitude of potential future conditions and policy decisions.

For the full story (pdf)

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.

“Today’s graphical user interfaces—windows, icons, mice and other pointing devices—were first developed in the 1960s and they haven’t changed much,” said Lombardi. “Better tools for interacting with data are out there. This meeting will be a first critical step in moving toward more collaborative, intuitive, human-computer interactions that have the ability to change how research is done and make science come alive for students and the general public.”

The workshop will involve computer scientists, engineers and experts in robotics, artificial intelligence, the cognitive sciences, psychology, neurobiology, architecture, design, and the interactive arts. They will address key questions in the field, including: Where do we want to be by the year 2018? How do we plan on getting there in a scalable and sustainable fashion? What are the major trends in the field? Which forces are driving change? What impedes further progress?

The workshop results will be captured in a report and disseminated to the NSF and the constituent communities.

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together teams of talented researchers, engineers, technologists and leaders in government, business, the arts and humanities to attack major research questions and community issues in ways that accelerate discovery and drive innovation. RENCI has nationally significant expertise and capabilities in high performance computing, visualization, collaborative tools, networking, device prototyping, and data systems as well as engagement sites across the state. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

The National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science today announced a five-year, $30 million award to the Open Science Grid Consortium to operate and expand the OSG, a computing environment used by scientists to harness computing resources and scientific data from around the world. RENCI will recruit scientists to the OSG from many disciplines, such as the biological, materials and environmental sciences. RENCI researchers will work with these new users to integrate new applications into the OSG framework and to ensure that the OSG’s networked environments and collaborative resources can serve a larger scope of scientific domains. 

“The OSG has proved itself in fields such as particle physics and nanotechnology,” said RENCI Director Dan Reed. “Now, it is important to expand its scope and help it evolve into an infrastructure used by all scientific domains.”

The OSG is built and operated by a unique partnership of universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations and software developers that work together to create a common distributed computing environment, or grid, for scientific research. Computing resources from more than 50 sites in the United States, Asia and South America are shared through the OSG. These resources range from small clusters of ten computers to large facilities with thousands of processors and millions of gigabytes of data storage.

“The ability to reliably share and analyze petabytes of data is critical to scientific discovery. This investment in sustaining and extending the Open Science Grid is an important component of the petascale science infrastructure,” said Michael Strayer, Director of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program and Associate Director for Advanced Scientific Computing Research in DOE’s Office of Science.

“The OSG has been operating since 2005 and has already had an impact on several areas of scientific research, from particle physics to biology,” said Joseph Dehmer, director of the NSF’s Division of Physics. “The NSF has partnered with the DOE’s Office of Science in support of the OSG’s efforts to empower scientific communities by providing them with effective and dependable access to an unprecedented distributed computing facility.”

Fifteen members of the OSG Consortium, including 11 U.S. universities and four national laboratories, will receive funding through the OSG award. Over the next five years, the consortium will reach out to more scientists and scientific collaborations, helping them to harness the power of grid computing for their research.

“OSG Consortium members contribute to and benefit from the OSG, making it a true community cyberinfrastructure,” says Fermilab’s Ruth Pordes, Executive Director of the OSG. “Our computing services support diverse research groups, and developers of campus and regional grids – points of entry to the grid for university scientists and students – are beginning to use the OSG environment to provide access to their resources.”

Scientists from many fields, including astrophysics, bioinformatics, computer science, nanotechnology, nuclear science and particle physics, use the OSG infrastructure. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration will use the OSG to integrate its computing facilities and enable its search for gravitational waves. Two particle physics collaborations rely on the OSG to fully participate in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

“The U.S. particle physicists participating in the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC will depend on the OSG to connect them with the data when it starts flowing from CERN in 2008,” said Robin Staffin, Associate Director for High Energy Physics in the DOE’s Office of Science. “Scientists will use LHC data to address profound questions about the universe, such as the origin of mass and the nature of dark matter.”

Together with other grid computing projects, from computing grids on university campuses to large national and international grid projects, the consortium works to create a worldwide computing infrastructure for scientific research.

“Distributed computing and cyberinfrastructure have the capability to transform research, but these tools and methods remain challenging for most scientists,” says Miron Livny from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, OSG Facility Coordinator. “Efforts such as the OSG work to democratize computing by lowering the barrier to individual scientists using distributed computing facilities.”

Funding for the OSG from the DOE’s Office of Science will be provided through the second round of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing program. Funding support from the National Science Foundation is provided by the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and the Office of International Science and Engineering.

For more information please visit http://www.opensciencegrid.org/

RENCI, Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute brings together computer and discipline scientists, artists, humanists, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, state leaders and educators for collaborations designed to reshape science, the economy, the state of North Carolina and the world. RENCI leverages its expertise and resources in leading edge computing, networking and data technologies to ignite innovation and find solutions to previously intractable problems. Founded in 2004 as a major collaborative venture of Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state of North Carolina, RENCI is a statewide virtual organization.  For more, see www.renci.org.

Under the three-year, $6 million agreement, CRA will create the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to identify major research opportunities and establish “grand challenges” for the field. The CCC will create venues for community participation for developing visions and creating new research activities.

One of the first tasks of the CCC will be to assume the role of community proxy organization for the NSF’s Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI) Project, providing broad scientific oversight to its potential construction and operation. In addition, the CCC will provide scientific oversight for future NSF large-scale computing research initiatives.

A council of 9 to 15 members and a council chair will lead the CCC. All council members will be leaders of the computing research community and will represent the diversity of that community.

“We’re pleased that NSF has charged our organization with establishing the CCC,” said Dan Reed, chair of the Computing Research Association and director of the Renaissance Computing Institute in North Carolina. “Computing research continues to fuel the innovations that drive economic productivity. We see the CCC as a mechanism that will enable continued innovation by enhancing our community’s ability to envision and pursue long-term, audacious computing research goals.”

Reed said the main challenges for the CCC will be to catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, to build consensus around research visions, to articulate those visions, and to develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives.

**About CRA** The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.

For more info about CRA: http://www.cra.org

The TeraGrid Bioportal is a shared, extensible portal environment that brings together more than 100 applications and many standard biological data sets. It provides access to high-end computing resources, including a dedicated cluster and TeraGrid systems across the U.S. Through the Bioportal, biological researchers, students and educators are able to seamlessly access data, resources and applications, compare biological data stored in different formats and remotely collaborate with colleagues.

The portal builds on the success of the North Carolina Bioportal, which was developed by RENCI for use by researchers and educators in North Carolina with seed funding from the University of North Carolina’s Office of the President. Development of the portal for TeraGrid users was supported by the TeraGrid Science Gateways program. RENCI also receives support from the National Institutes of Health for work integrating evolutionary biology and biomedical tools into the Bioportal.

“By incorporating the Bioportal into the TeraGrid infrastructure we are giving a large community of researchers in genomics, proteomics, molecular biology and other fields access to a nationwide network of high-end resources,” said Dan Reed, director of RENCI and principal investigator on the Bioportal TeraGrid Science Gateway project. “These are researchers whose work will have far-reaching impacts. They are uncovering relationships between genetics and human diseases, developing new treatments and even finding cures.”

The Bioportal is an open source framework that builds on emerging grid technologies from the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative (NMI) and the Open Grid Computing Environment (OGCE) tool suite. Its grid middleware layer is based on Globus, the fundamental open source software for sharing resources and tools across distributed sites, and MyProxy, the grid credential management system. Bioportal resources support a number of common research activities, including database searching, alignment and phylogeny, pattern searching, DNA/RNA analysis and protein analysis. In addition to offering access to TeraGrid resources, the TeraGrid version of Bioportal offers a number of new features, including:

• new versions of widely used open source bioinformatics applications
• automated file format conversion
• enhancements to security policies to align with campus policies.

“The Bioportal project is an excellent example of the how the TeraGrid Science Gateway projects are extending the capabilities of the TeraGrid and providing access to this national cyberinfrastructure facility for a wider community of users,” said TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago.

Before the end of the year, RENCI will incorporate a workflow system into the Bioportal that will allow users to chain applications together for multifaceted analyses. Workshops for researchers, educators and students also are planned.

RENCI…Catalyst for Innovation
The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) is a catalyst for innovation in science, engineering, the arts, humanities, and commerce. It fosters multidisciplinary collaborations by leveraging and applying leading edge compute, network, and data information technology resources and capabilities. RENCI is a joint institute of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University that combines the strengths of these three institutions with the social, business and research opportunities of the Research Triangle Park and the state of North Carolina. For more, see www.renci.org.

About Teragrid
The TeraGrid, sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure, is a partnership of people and comprehensive resources that enables discovery in U.S. science and engineering research. Through high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates a distributed set of high capability computational, data management and visualization resources to make U.S. research more productive. With Science Gateway collaborations and education and mentoring programs, the TeraGrid also connects and broadens scientific communities.

Relevant URLs
TeraGrid Bioportal
Official TeraGrid Website
North Carolina Bioportal

Built and implemented over the last four years, the TeraGrid is the world’s most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. Through high performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates high performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country.  The TeraGrid currently serves over 1,600 scientists and engineers who use computational, data management and visualization resources at eight sites across the U.S.

The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI, www.renci.org) hosted the meeting. RENCI Director Dan Reed helped develop the TeraGrid project in 2001 when he was director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He coined the term TeraGrid to describe a grid infrastructure capable of moving and analyzing trillions of bytes of data – or terabytes. RENCI contributes to the TeraGrid through the Science Gateways initiative. Science Gateways work to make TeraGrid resources accessible to new  communities of users through common Web portal interfaces. RENCI works with three TeraGrid Science Gateway projects:

• RENCI leads the Bioportal and Biomedicine Science Gateway project, which is developing a portal interface that will give biologists an easy-to-use interface for developing computational models, comparing large datasets including genomic sequences, accessing instruments and collaborating with colleagues. RENCI is adapting its North Carolina Bioportal for the TeraGrid.
• The Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) Science Gateway is creating cyberenvironments for mesoscale atmospheric research. RENCI’s work with LEAD focuses on performance monitoring and adaptation and fault tolerance performability and recovery for the LEAD infrastructure.
• RENCI participates in the Open Science Grid, a consortium of U.S. universities and laboratories that works to create a common national grid infrastructure that is open in its architecture, implementation and use.

More science, more successes

As the TeraGrid has matured, it has become an important resource for researchers working on a wide range of scientific problems. Examples include:

• Harvey Newman, a particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology, ran simulations across multiple TeraGrid sites using Gridshell, which provides built-in support for job submission and scheduling, remote I/O redirection, parallel execution of commands/jobs, and inter-script task communication. Newman is investigating the discovery potential of CERN’s CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. The work involves generating, simulating, reconstructing and analyzing tens of millions of proton-proton collisions.
• Klaus Schulten, a University of Illinois molecular biologist, conducted simulations of the activities of nuclear pores, large protein complexes that allow water soluble molecules to pass into a cell’s nucleus but restrict other molecules from passing.
• The MIMD Lattice Calculation (MILC) collaboration, led by Bob Sugar of the University of California at Santa Barbara, continues to be one of the largest users of TeraGrid resources. The group studies quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, which describes the span interactions that bind protons and neutrons together to form the nuclei of atoms.
• In a TeraGrid use that extends beyond science, Rob Shakespeare, a professor in the theatre and drama department at Indiana University, is using TeraGrid resources to create virtual environments to replace traditional theatre sets.

The future: accessibility and interoperability

Grids, according to TeraGrid Director Charlie Catlett, can be much more than a system for linking and accessing powerful computing resources.

“There are growing data collections out there and researchers would be well served if they were integrated and easily accessible,” he said. “There is a need for collaborative services and for work flow systems that can readily incorporate TeraGrid resources. These are all important elements of the TeraGrid infrastructure and of cyberinfrastructure in general. We must extend these capabilities.”

The Science Gateway projects are an important ingredient in extending the capabilities and accessibility of the TeraGrid and new Science Gateway projects that operate seamlessly with the TeraGrid is a goal in the coming year, added Catlett.

In addition, TeraGrid technical staff will continue to implement tools that make collaboration, scheduling and other operations as easy as possible. These include advanced capabilities such as web services enabled by the Globus Toolkit (GT4), new scheduling services, expansion of the high performance, wide area distributed file systems and introduction of a TeraGrid user portal.

More information about TeraGrid facilities, science highlights, science gateways, and other programs is available at www.teragrid.org.

Relevant URLs:
TeraGrid Website
North Carolina Bioportal