Cloud-computing infrastructure and technology for education (C.I.T.E)

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This proposal will be awarded using funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5), and meets the requirements established in Section 2 of the White House Memorandum entitled, Ensuring Responsible Spending of Recovery Act Funds, dated March 20, 2009.This project will support the development of middleware that will enable numerical models to be run on commercial compute farms via cloud computing and exploited in ongoing and future classroom educational activities.The intellectual merit of this work derives from two linked parts: (1) development of technology that would be suitable for many educational scenarios, including providing access to parallel computing resources in classrooms (K-12 on to university). Students and teachers would be able to run and interact with numerical models developed by leading researchers without the overhead of supporting software distributed to desktops in a school or the logistical headache of maintaining a cluster resource. Commercial compute farms would be exploited in which the technical `nitty-gritty' is outsourced to these specialized providers. (2) showcasing the technology in a `virtual fluid laboratory' that will be used in ongoing undergraduate and graduate courses being offered at MIT and collaborating universities.Broad impacts arise as the software technology that will be developed is very general and could be applied to make computer models part of almost any course available in, for example, MIT's Open Course Ware initiative. It can release the power of compute clusters to anyone with a low cost laptop or `netbook' computer.