 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
|
Special Features:
CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE TO
REVOLUTIONIZE SCIENCE
The convergence of information and communication technologies into a
national
"cyberinfrastructure" is poised to revolutionize the environmental sciences
and many other disciplines in the coming years, according to researchers
presenting at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle. The two Feb. 13 sessions on
cyberinfrastructure were organized by the heads of two National Science
Foundation (NSF) directorates.
The speakers will describe a very near future in which computing
capabilities
will provide better forecasts of when and where earthquakes are likely to
occur and how the ground will shake as a result. Global climate models will
simulate complex chemical, biological and geological processes in the Earth's
air, oceans and land over thousands of years. Robotic sensors will monitor
ecosystem health or track pollutants in urban watersheds in real-time.
"New instrumentation, data-handling and computation capabilities will
expand
the horizons of what we can study and understand about the environment," said
Margaret Leinen, head of NSF's Geosciences directorate and co-organizer of the
two AAAS symposia. "Cyberinfrastructure is empowering a new generation of
environmental researchers in their quest to unravel how the world around us
works." Cyberinfrastructure has become a common theme throughout NSF, and
every directorate has funded or is exploring cyberinfrastructure-related
projects.
In environmental science, cyberinfrastructure combines computation,
information management, networking and intelligent sensing systems into
powerful tools that permit scientists to investigate the natural world and the
human-built environment in their full complexity, from the molecular scale to
the planetary. This complexity requires collecting and analyzing large volumes
of data, performing experiments with computer models rather than just in
laboratories and bringing together collaborators from many disciplines.
The challenges of vast amounts of data and complex processes across many
scales are faced by many, if not all, scientific disciplines. The NSF's larger
goal for a national cyberinfrastructure is to provide the information
technology and knowledge management resources needed to tackle the problems at
the frontiers of all science and engineering disciplines, and make those
resources as reliable and easy to use as the electricity and water in our
homes.
"From the Internet to the Extensible Terascale Facility, the emerging
cyberinfrastructure NSF supports is a product of the scientific community's
demands for and reliance on information and communications technologies," said
Peter Freeman, head of the NSF's Computer and Information Science and
Engineering (CISE) directorate and the symposia's other co-organizer. NSF's
Extensible Terascale Facility is a multiyear effort to deploy a comprehensive
infrastructure of computation, information and instrumentation resources for
academic research and education.
New CISE division director for Shared Cyberinfrastructure, Sangtae Kim,
will
co-chair the symposia. Kim is the Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor
at Purdue University, an endowed chair for research at the intersection
between information technology and engineering, and was vice president and
information officer of Lilly Research Laboratories.
Last February, a report from the NSF Advisory Committee for
Cyberinfrastructure noted that cyberinfrastructure is "essential, not
optional, to the aspirations of research communities" and that success would
require collaboration between the physical and life sciences, computer science
and the social sciences.
The AAAS symposia bring together computer and environmental scientists,
many
collaborating on NSF awards, to describe research at the frontiers of computer
science that is leading to cyberinfrastructure and the groundbreaking research
in environmental science that will be possible when tapping into vast
computation and data resources becomes as easy as turning on a light
switch.
Deborah Estrin, director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Network
Sensing
at UCLA, will describe how networks of smart sensors are being deployed to
monitor and collect information on endangered species, soil and air
contaminants and medical patients, as well as buildings, bridges and other
man-made structures. Estrin is also slated to deliver an AAAS topical lecture
on "Instrumenting the World with Wireless Sensor Networks."
To better predict earthquake occurrence and the resulting ground motion,
NSF
is supporting the Community Modeling Environment project, led by the Southern
California Earthquake Center (SCEC). The project's goals are to better
understand earthquakes and to provide information crucial to designing civil
infrastructure and to disaster planning in regions such as Southern
California. SCEC's Thomas Jordan will discuss both the scientific advances and
the cyberinfrastructure from the project, including smart modeling tools and
the shared computing environment and virtual community created between SCEC,
the University of Southern California, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and
the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
Research on the weather, the climate and the whole-Earth system will also
benefit from the capabilities of a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure. Bob
Wilhelmson of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois will describe how the NSF-funded Linked Environments
for Atmospheric Discovery project will integrate many real-time data streams
with customized weather models and on-demand computing to provide timely
severe weather forecasts in unprecedented detail.
Jeffrey Kiehl of the NSF-supported National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR) will describe the work done with the Community Climate System Model,
one of the world's most sophisticated climate models. Developed by a
consortium of climate and computer scientists, this experimental tool
integrates global models of the atmosphere, ocean, land and sea-ice to study
the Earth's climate. And Timothy Killeen, director of NCAR, will discuss
whole-Earth system modeling and the multi-agency Earth System Modeling
Framework collaboration.
Ecologists and biodiversity researchers face challenges in accessing and
integrating the data needed to ask groundbreaking questions and to help
scientists, policymakers and the public make informed decisions about the
environment. William Michener of NSF's Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)
Network Office will discuss how the NSFsupported Science Environment for
Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) project is tackling the challenges of integrating
data collections. When these integrated collections are combined with modern
reasoning software, the computer can become a scientist's "intelligent
assistant."
Other symposia speakers include Dan Reed of the University of North
Carolina
and a well-known leader in cyberinfrastructure; William Swartout of the
University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies;
Jeffrey Naughton of the University of Wisconsin; and Tom Anderson of the
University of Washington.
The two AAAS symposia on cyberinfrastructure are scheduled for Friday, Feb.
13, 9 a.m.-12 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m. Estrin's topical lecture on sensor
networks is 1:30 p.m.-2:15 p.m. the same day.
Cyberinfrastructure activities are the most recent evolution of NSF's long
history of leadership in providing the most advanced information technologies
for the U.S. academic community. NSF supported campus computing centers in the
1960s, established national supercomputer centers in the 1980s and supports
the Extensible Terascale Facility and many other cyberinfrastructure projects
today. In parallel, NSF established NSFnet in the mid- 1980s, which evolved
into today's commercial Internet, and in the 1990s helped connect hundreds of
institutions to advanced research networks.
Also in the late 1990s, NSF established the Partnerships for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (PACI), which have nurtured and supported the
growing demand by the science and engineering community for
cyberinfrastructure. The Extensible Terascale Facility and the seeds of many
cyberinfrastructure-related projects for specific disciplines, supported by
NSF and other agencies, can be found in the PACI program, the NSF Middleware
Initiative and projects funded through the NSF's Information Technology
Research priority area.
|