Developing and Extending a Cyberinfrastructure Model

Increasingly, research and education institutions are realizing the strategic value and challenge of deploying and supporting institutional cyberinfrastructure (CI). Cyberinfrastructure is composed of high performance computing systems, massive storage systems, visualization systems, and advanced networks to interconnect the components within and across institutions and research communities. CI also includes the professionals with expertise in scientific application and algorithm development and parallel systems operation. Unlike ?regular? IT infrastructure, the manner in which the components are configured and skills to do so are highly specific and specialized. Planning and coordinating these assets is a fundamental step toward enhancing an institution?s research competitiveness and return on personnel, technology, and facilities investments. Coordinated deployment of CI assets has implications across the institution. Consider the VC for Research whose new faculty in the Life Sciences are now asking for simulation systems rather than wet labs, or the Provost who lost another faculty candidate to a peer institution that offered computational support for research, or the VC for Administration who has seen a spike in power and cooling demands from many of the labs and office spaces being converted to house systems. These are just some of the issues that research institutions are wrestling with as research becomes increasingly computational, data-intensive and interdisciplinary. This bulletin will discuss these issues and will present an approach for developing a cyberinfrastructure model that was successfully developed at one institution and then deployed across institutions