This proposal will be awarded using funds made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5), and meets the requirements established in Section 2 of the White House Memorandum entitled, Ensuring Responsible Spending of Recovery Act Funds, dated March 20, 2009.
As globally distributed research teams work more closely to solve complex problems utilizing high-performance cyberinfrastructure, from petascale computers to specialized instrumentation generating massive amounts of data, the need for high-resolution visualization is becoming more critical for analysis, and is propelling the worldwide adoption of "OptIPortals". An OptIPortal is an ultra-resolution visualization display instrument interconnected by optical networks that enables the creation of "cyber-mashups," or juxtapositions, of data visualizations, enabling greater insight. SAGE, the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment, is cross-platform middleware that enables users worldwide to have a common operating environment, or framework, for accessing, streaming and juxtaposing high-resolution visualizations on one or more OptIPortals. This project will transition SAGE from a transformative research prototype to a hardened technology that provides production-quality, community-driven open services for visualization and collaboration utilizing shared national and international cyberinfrastructure, for the advancement of scientific research and education.
Intellectual Merit Coping with complexity and scale in data is a problem that spans all of e-science. Using OptIPortals and SAGE, scientists can create visualization pipelines from multiple sources - whether supercomputers, data storage systems and/or instruments (such as high-definition cameras), as well as laptop screens and the Web - to access and share a variety of information, in a variety of resolutions and formats, and create giant Cyber-Mashups.
Broader Impact Our Nation already invests in network-connected, middleware-enabled cyberinfrastructure to generate and disseminate petabytes (ultimately exabytes) of data among researchers worldwide. What is missing, however, is a globally integrated collaborative work environment to facilitate data analysis and high productivity. Funding to provide a production-quality SAGE will make cyberinfrastructure more accessible to broader communities of scientists and students, and help maintain US leadership in high-performance computing.
