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NSF FUNDS HANDFUL OF GRID PROJECTS AT UC-SAN DIEGO

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded more than $9 million from its Information Technology Research (ITR) program to create six novel research projects at the University of California, San Diego, with broad societal impact. Scientists and engineers will use the funds to develop technologies to connect land-based researchers to ocean sensors off the west coast of North America; to get early earthquake warnings from remote areas via high-speed wireless networks; to protect the Internet's Domain Name System; and to improve the effectiveness of image-guided neurosurgery; and more.

This is the fifth and final year of the ITR program, which committed over $1 billion to this 'priority area' to encourage innovative, high-payoff research and education. Three of the largest awards in 2004 went to projects led all or in part by UCSD researchers.

"The ITR program has dedicated major resources to address the information technology priorities facing the country, including advances in science and engineering, economic prosperity and a vibrant civil society, and homeland security," said Marye Anne Fox, UCSD's new chancellor. "Given the competitive, merit-reviewed nature of the program, these NSF awards recognize the sustained excellence that characterizes UCSD's research program in information technology and communications."

The largest awards going to researchers at UCSD this year include:

The Laboratory for Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid (LOOKING) project will develop cyberinfrastructure to link researchers on land to sensor arrays and ocean observatories in the Northeast Pacific and offshore Southern California. The software, hardware and network services developed mainly at the University of Washington and UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography will eventually permit researchers, educators and students to access and analyze ocean and atmospheric data in real time, and even control undersea sensors and robotic platforms from the relative comfort of their labs and classrooms.
To maintain the reliability and stable evolution of the Internet, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) will design new ways to monitor and protect the Internet's Domain Name System.
Early warning systems for earthquakes and rapid-deployment networks for real-life crisis management are two areas of network research to be pursued by High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN). Funded by the NSF four years ago, the high-speed network now connects remote areas of Southern California to the Internet. Using HPWREN as a platform, scientists will now develop seismology, homeland security and other societal applications to run on the network, in collaboration with educators, Native American tribes and first responders.

Improving the effectiveness of brain surgery is the goal of another SDSC project funded by the ITR program today. It will develop and deploy a Grid architecture to handle the massive amount of data required to show the surgeon exactly what is happening to a patient's brain during image-guided neurosurgery. Researchers at the supercomputer center will also develop better ways to share large data files in Grids, digital libraries and so-called 'persistent' archives. Also funded by the NSF: a joint project between UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering and Princeton to address the theoretical foundation for interactive computing, which concerns information and communication complexity.

Since 1999, the ITR program has funded several large research endeavors led by UCSD scientists from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a partnership of UCSD and UC Irvine: the OptIPuter project in 2002, and RESCUE (Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events) in 2003. As with LOOKING, these grants were the largest made in those years by the NSF's information-technology program.