Project GreenLight Workshop for MSI-CIEC: Greening and Growing Campus Cyberinfrastructure for Minority-Serving Institutions

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Like all colleges and universities, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) are developing strategies to support science and engineering research with advanced cyberinfrastructure. Two enabling technologies are of particular interest to these institutions: visualization and energy-conscious networked cluster computing. The NSF-supported UCSD OptIPuter/OptiPortal and GreenLight projects are now ready for broader deployment across the US. Researchers from a dozen MSI institutions have asked for hands-on experience at UCSD. This project provides participants with technical background and best practices on the GreenLight Instrument for computing and installing, maintaining, and using OptIPortals for advanced telepresence and visualization. Project GreenLight officially partners with the NSF Minority-Serving Institutions CyberInfrastructure Coalition (MSI-CIEC), which has held three workshops (to date) at UC San Diego. The organizations that comprise the Alliance for Equity in Higher Education, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), established the MSI-CIEC to promote, encourage and facilitate the meaningful engagement of minority-serving institutions in cyberinfrastructure. The GreenLight Instrument enables application scientists to understand how to make greener choices, while still exploiting the exponential growth of computing, storage, and networking required for them to continue to compete globally on frontier scientific research. The GreenLight Instrument helps campuses and users understand how to take advantage of novel renewable and off-grid energy/cooling sources as well as employ middleware that automates optimal choice of cluster compute/storage/power strategies. The overall result is both cost and energy savings to campuses, valuable results for all institutions but essential for minority-serving institutions which often operate with far lower operating budgets than their majority-serving 4-year college counterparts.