This is a request for funds to develop, deploy, and operate distributed cyberinfrastructure for applications requiring data-intensive distributed computing technology. The PIs plan to achieve this goal through cross-disciplinary collaboration with computer scientists, middleware developers and scientists in other fields with similar computing technology needs. The project will deploy the Data Intensive Science University Network (DISUN), a grid-based facility comprising computing, network, middleware and personnel resources, from four universities, Caltech, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Florida and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. DISUN will provide computational, storage, and network facilities, and most importantly, the tools to make these resources accessible to scientists at remote sites. This group will enable other sciences to use their pioneering efforts in developing cyberinfrastructure.
The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in the distributed cyberinfrastructure that will be developed, deployed and operated. The funds will be used for computing facilities and for personnel who will install and operate them, support scientists and train other researchers and students. There will be close coordination with physicists from other experiments and software engineers will be deployed to ensure that DISUN is applicable to the data intensive science community at large. DISUN heavily leverages the resources of other federally supported activities, including the Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT), created and supported by the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN) and the international Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL); Wisconsin's Condor team; the distributed Grid and network system services developed in the CMS Analysis: an Interactive Grid-Enabled Environment (CAIGEE) and UltraLight projects; and the Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG).
DISUN's broad impact will be a measurable improvement in the scientific computing capabilities of university-based researchers. For such scientists, the services provided by this cyberinfrastructure will dramatically enhance their ability to mobilize computing resources to attack new research problems and to strengthening their participation in national and international research projects.
