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Cyberinfrastructure

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The term "cyberinfrastructure (CI)" describes research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.

Coinage and Usage

The term was used by a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) blue-ribbon committee in 2003 in response to the question: how can NSF, as the nation's premier agency funding basic research, remove existing barriers to the rapid evolution of high performance computing, making it truly usable by all the nation's scientists, engineers, scholars, and citizens?

The NSF use of the term focuses on the integrated assemblage of these information technologies with one another. Cyberinfrastructure is also called e-Science; in particular, the United Kingdom has a major e-Science initiative.

An alternative use of the term "cyberinfrastructure" evolved from the same thinking that produced Presidential Decision Directive NSC-63[1] on Protecting America's Critical Infrastructures (PDD-63). PDD-63 focuses on the security and vulnerability of the nation’s “cyber-based information systems” as well as the critical infrastructures on which America’s military strength and economic well-being depend, such as the electric power grid, transportation networks, potable water and wastewater infrastructures, etc..

The term "cyberinfrastructure" appears to be first documented on the web in a press briefing on PDD-63 on May 22, 1998[2] with Richard Clarke, then National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism, and Jeffrey Hunker, who had just been named Director of the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office. Dr. Hunker, now Professor of Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College stated:

"One of the key conclusions of the President's commission that laid the intellectual framework for the President's announcement today was that while we certainly have a history of some real attacks, some very serious, to our "cyber-infrastructure", the real threat lay in the future. And we can't say whether that's tomorrow or years hence. But we've been very successful as a country and as an economy in wiring together our critical infrastructures. This is a development that's taken place really over the last 10 or 15 years -- the Internet, most obviously, but electric power, transportation systems, our banking and financial systems."

Complimenting the technical construction of cyberinfrasturcture, social scientists largely in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) investigate the organizational and social aspects of building these large-scale, distributed resources to support science. Related to this research space is the notion of the collaboratory, originally coined by William Wulf.

CI Research Institutes

NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure, for example, supports the TeraGrid project which provides integrated resources and services operated by some of the nation's supercomputing centers including:

and partner high-performance computing centers at:

The Department of Energy supports e-Science through high performance computing and other initiatives involving its laboratories, including, among others:

Together, the Department of Energy (Office of Science SciDAC-2 program from the High Energy Physics, Nuclear Physics and Advanced Software and Computing Research programs) and NSF (Math and Physical Sciences, Office of CyberInfrastructure and Office of International Science and Engineering Directorates) support the Open Science Grid which is a consortium of more than 80 member institutions and alliances. Among its members are:

Quotations

Cyberinfrastructure is the coordinated aggregate of software, hardware and other technologies, as well as human expertise, required to support current and future discoveries in science and engineering. The challenge of Cyberinfrastructure is to integrate relevant and often disparate resources to provide a useful, usable, and enabling framework for research and discovery characterized by broad access and “end-to-end” coordination.[3]

Cyberinfrastructure consists of computing systems, data storage systems, advanced instruments and data repositories, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and high performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible. [4]

Like the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, power grids, telephone lines, and water systems that support modern society, "cyberinfrastructure" refers to the distributed computer, information and communication technologies combined with the personnel and integrating components that provide a long-term platform to empower the modern scientific research endeavor.[5]

See also

References

  1. ^ Presidential Decision Directive NSC-63
  2. ^ Press Briefing on PDD-63 on May 22, 1998
  3. ^ SBE/CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for the Social Sciences, Fran Berman, San Diego Supercomputer Center and UC San Diego
  4. ^ Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure Newsletter, Craig Stewart
  5. ^ Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure

Natural Sciences domain

Social Sciences and Humanities domain

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