The research will develop a cyberinfrastructure middleware (CINET) to support Network Science. The National Research Council defines Network Science as ``the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena.'' CINET will provide researchers, analysts and educators interested in Network Science with an easy-to-use cyber-environment that is accessible from their desktop and integrates into their daily work. CINET will expand the size of networks that are routinely studied from hundreds or thousands of nodes to hundreds of millions of nodes. It will foster multi-disciplinary and multi-university research and teaching collaborations, including disciplines such as social sciences that traditionally have not used high performance computing resources.
CINET will be pervasive, flexible and extensible. Users can contribute new networks, data, methods, hardware, and research results in an integrative way. Advanced users can expand CINET by adding new tools, user interfaces, recommendation engines, digital library features, or other desired functionality. End users will be insulated from the complexities of resource allocation, scheduling, cross-platform interactions, and other detailed computing considerations.
CINET will enable new ways by which researchers study and teach complex networks. It will enable educators to harness high performance computing technologies to teach Network Science to students spanning various academic levels, disciplines and institutions. The educational plan includes high school students to Ph.D. candidates, students from minority and under-represented groups, and students at smaller institutions that often do not have easy access to HPC resources. Education material will be disseminated widely through the Ensemble pathways project in NSF's educational digital library, NSDL.
