Like all colleges and universities, minority-serving institutions (MSIs) are developing strategies to support science and engineering research with advanced cyberinfrastructure. Two enabling technologies are of particular interest to these institutions: visualization and energy-conscious networked cluster computing. The NSF-supported UCSD OptIPuter/OptiPortal and GreenLight projects are now ready for broader deployment across the US. Researchers from a dozen MSI institutions have asked for hands-on experience at UCSD. This project provides participants with technical background and best practices on the GreenLight Instrument for computing and installing, maintaining, and using OptIPortals for advanced telepresence and visualization.
Project GreenLight officially partners with the NSF Minority-Serving Institutions CyberInfrastructure Coalition (MSI-CIEC), which has held three workshops (to date) at UC San Diego. The organizations that comprise the Alliance for Equity in Higher Education, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO), established the MSI-CIEC to promote, encourage and facilitate the meaningful engagement of minority-serving institutions in cyberinfrastructure. The GreenLight Instrument enables application scientists to understand how to make greener choices, while still exploiting the exponential growth of computing, storage, and networking required for them to continue to compete globally on frontier scientific research. The GreenLight Instrument helps campuses and users understand how to take advantage of novel renewable and off-grid energy/cooling sources as well as employ middleware that automates optimal choice of cluster compute/storage/power strategies. The overall result is both cost and energy savings to campuses, valuable results for all institutions but essential for minority-serving institutions which often operate with far lower operating budgets than their majority-serving 4-year college counterparts.
CI-TEAM Minority Serving Institutions - CyberInfrastructure Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC) OptIPortable Workshop at UCSD/Calit2 Outcome: UCSD hosted an "OptIPortable" workshop for minority-serving institutions in an effort to spread knowledge of the construction of portable display wall usage to improve scientific and educational collaboration. In collaboration with Richard Al?, Program Director at NSF and Professor Ongard Sirisaengtaksin of UHD, Calit2 hosted a September 2011 MSI-CIEC Workshop on OptIPortable configuration and operation. This workshop was supported by the National Science Foundation, through the CI-TEAM Minority Serving Institutions - CyberInfrastructure Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC) and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. It hosted 25 research staff and faculty participants from Minority serving institutions. This was the third MSI workshop of a series at UCSD which promoted the use of advanced cyber-infrastructure to support data analysis and distance collaboration, using high resolution display wall environments connected by high speed networks; another one is planned for June 2012. Impact/benefits: Virtual room technologies will enable a next generation scalable distributed, high-resolution visualization resources for collaborative work in the sciences, engineering and the arts. Distributed applications include: collaboration with multiple high-resolution data types; prototyping command and control environments; digital cinema post-production review and editing; tele-immersive 3D interactions; brainstorming/storyboarding, and other pedagogical activities. Explanation: Dramatic display walls are much more than showcases of spectacular graphics. They enhance faculty and students’ capacity to analyze local and remote data and to participate in remote/distributed collaborations. The Minority-Serving Institution CyberInfrastructure Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC) collaborated closely with UCSD’s San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Calit2 to present the OptIPortable workshop. The workshop was designed to help Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) faculty and staff understand benefits and possible uses for OptIPortable collaboration technologies, coupled with inspiring and practical ideas for using these technologies at their own institutions. Following the workshop’s practical implementation training, MSI-CIEC worked with participants to discuss these technologies with colleagues and explore potential collaborative grant proposals to enable campus installations.
