Enhancing Inter- and Intra-campus Cyberinfrastructure at West Virginia's Research Institutions

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Enhancing Inter- and Intra-campus Cyberinfrastructure at West Virginia's Research Institutions Proposal Number: EPS - 1006576 Institution: West Virginia Higher Education Policy CommissionProject Director: Paul L HillThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This award, "Enhancing Inter- and Intra-campus Cyberinfrastructure at West Virginia's Research Institutions," describes a project focused on advancing cyberinfrastructure (CI) to current research standards at West Virginia's (WV) two research universities, and enables Internet2 access potential for the state's predominantly undergraduate colleges and universities (PUIs), community and technical colleges (CTCs), and the K-12 community that participate on the State Network (WVNET) as a whole. This effort is expected to be primarily directed towards developing the inter-campus CI at Marshall University (MU), and upgrading the intra-campus CI at West Virginia University (WVU). The activities complement other investments by NSF, the state, and its research institutions and are aligned with the broad CI goals and specific objectives of the WV Statewide Science and Technology Strategic Plan for CI (Vision 2015: Cyberinfrastructure). Vision 2015 has been the driving force behind the successful expansion of academic research infrastructure in the state. The CI component of Vision 2015 encourages deployment of sustainable CI resources and focuses on expansion of advanced network infrastructure. Other goals include enhanced high-performance computing and data storage resources, inter-institutional collaboration tools, and deployment of advanced applications and tools that can be utilized by the research community.Intellectual MeritWith improved inter- and intra- campus connectivity, research and education endeavors will be greatly enhanced in the State of WV. The impact of improved connectivity would reach a diversity of disciplines ranging from bionanoscience, energy, neuroscience, and astrophysics to cancer therapy and gene mapping. CI improvements are planned to enable research and education in bionanoscience and engineering, neuroscience, computational fluid dynamics and applied multi-physics, multiscale modeling of energy resources, astrophysics, data mining and bioinformatics with biomedical data, and many other science disciplines. While coming from widely different disciplinary areas across science and engineering, all these topics share a series of common elements: very large data sets, complex computational systems, and interactive visualization needs. The proposed CI would provide all these investigators with powerful new capabilities for discoveries that generate a truly transformative setting. In addition to the direct and obvious benefits, there are subtler long-term impacts that result from the sharing of knowledge and common tools. They would lead to a community of shared research practice that empowers the participants in unexpected ways. These research areas and many others would benefit from this enhanced cyber capability. With these improvements to CI, researchers would be afforded new opportunities to compete for funding and resources currently out of reach because of WV's cyber-limitations. Broader ImpactsEnhanced CI through increased connectivity will improve the State's research infrastructure and human resource development through a comprehensive plan for integrating sustainable research, education and workforce development within the framework of WV's universities, PUIs, and CTCs and the State's citizenry. To realize revolutions in the processes of learning and discovery, new types of networked resources also demand a new level of technical competence. The project would have direct impact on students and the professional IT workforce at two research institutions and eight PUIs, and on the research capability for dozens of participating faculty and research students. By leveraging the NSF and state investments from the recent RII Track 2 award, campus champions of WVU, MU and West Virginia State University (WVSU) would become state champions for broadband technologies who will impact higher education, K-12 and economic development throughout the state.