This project will develop and deploy educational modules on a specific form of CyberInfrastructure (CI), statewide across an EPSCoR state (Oklahoma), regionally among several EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR states, and nationally, targeted initially at scalable bioinformatics education and research efforts, but also accessible and applicable to education and research across all science and engineering disciplines. By leveraging existing CI and bioinformatics software technologies (Condor and BLAST), as well as PCs that are already in service for desktop use, this CI-TEAM project will: enable CI education and research; train technicians in CI deployment, configuration and management; enable bioinformatics education and research by providing BLAST over Condor; enable education and research across the full spectrum of science and engineering. This project will use BLAST as a kickstart application, to engage the interest of potential additional collaborators. In addition, this project will support a large number of projects unrelated to BLAST, including microarray data analysis, statistical inference, phylogenetics, computational evolution, genomic and proteomic bioarray analysis, genetic algorithms, brain region modeling, high performance networking, high energy physics, cyberinfrastructure development and deployment, nanotechnology, heat transport, flood forecasting, weather radar data mining and analysis, robot learning, scientific data representation, distributed scheduling, unfolding neutron spectra, gravity simulation, laser tweezer manipulation.
This project will advance discovery and understanding in Grid computing, bioinformatics and a wide variety of other disciplines. It will broaden participation by including participants from minority serving, high school, 2-year, 4-year, Masters-granting and PhD-granting institutions, most of them in EPSCoR states. The Condor pool will enhance infrastructure by providing resources to dozens of scientists at the participating institutions. Dissemination will include the University of Oklahoma's annual Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium, which attracts hundreds of academic, government and industry representatives from over a dozen states; the project team will also give talks at other conferences and will establish a website. Education will be enhanced not only by the Condor and BLAST education modules, but also because several of the research projects that will use the Condor flock have substantial education components, and some are entirely focused on education.
