Collaborative Research: Cyberinfrastructure for Transformational Scientific Discovery in Arkansas and West Virginia (CI-Train)

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EPS-0918970, University of Arkansas, Amy W. Apon, linked to EPS-0918949 (WV Higher Education Policy Commission) Collaborative Research: Cyberinfrastructure for Transformational Scientific Discovery in Arkansas and West Virginia (CI-Train)This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The partnership between Arkansas (AR) and West Virginia (WV) builds on common research in geosciences, virtual environments, and computational sciences while leveraging technical expertise within the two states: WV leverages expertise in the deployment and operation of shared high performance computing resources while AR leverages expertise in visualization and modeling. This consortium seeks to create a nationally competitive computation and visualization environment; to provide visualization display devices at each partnering institution; and to procure a suite of hardware and software for data capture and content creation that can enable a broad range of research and education activities across several science and engineering domains. The consortium seeks to build the needed cyberinfrastructure to advance the frontiers of knowledge in several scientific domains, and to transform information technology services for enabling discovery and innovation. Intellectual MeritTaken together, access to CI resources will enable transformative research in a number of domain areas across the CI-TRAIN consortium. The areas are chosen because of their importance to the participating jurisdictions and include multi-scale geomatics and geosciences; scalable virtual world technology; nanoscience, including low-dimensional multiferroics and atomistic simulation of defects in nanocrystalline materials; real-time image guided surgery; discovering new physics and phenomena in nanostructured materials; plant secondary cell wall reconstruction; near field scanning optical microscopy; and performance models of large scale clusters that can be applied to TeraGrid resources. Although the topics span vastly different disciplines, they all share a number of common elements, namely, very large data sets, complex computational systems, and interactive visualization needs.Each domain area provides intellectual merit. For example, the geomatics area team seeks to create a ?smart world? defined as a visually immersive environment rich with real-world content and real-time responses to real-world events, bringing a better sense of presence to mirror world applications and a better sense of place and time to virtual world applications. The researchers seek to use this ?smart world? to overcome shortcomings of virtual environments that inhibit realistic modeling of air and water (and other fluids).Broader ImpactsThrough enabling access to the TeraGrid and other national NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure resources, the consortium?s participants will gain the needed computational support for science and engineering research not available locally. Access to computational infrastructures will enable insights into nanostructures that can in turn be used to guide the design and improvement of devices such as actuators and sensors. The resulting research products in visualizations, geosciences, and virtual world will provide a powerful environment for managers, planners, emergency response personnel, and others to quickly plan and manage communities, emergencies, and other complex processes. In addition, CI-TRAIN will be a tested for the development of approaches to real-time image-guided surgery that will allow safe obliteration of solid tumors anywhere in the human body. Finally, innovative studies that explore the 3-D structures of plant cell walls will assist in understanding how to cost effectively recover components of the cell wall for use in bio-based product development.