Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is a critical enabler of national importance for expanding scientific discovery and industrial applications. To realize CI?s full potential, domain scientists need to easily run their existing applications on the CI available to them. Scientists also need to be able to design their future applications in a way that allows them to take advantage of an ever-changing and growing CI. However, the current technology used to create CI applications presents two problems: (1) they are either too generic and do not provide the right level of abstraction to allow experts in diverse domains to easily code their application logic; or (2) they are too specific, in most cases following a stove-pipe development process, resulting in rigid and expensive solutions that do not promote the reuse of commonalities across domains.
Leveraging an innovative and successful international industry and university partnership called Latin American Grid (LA Grid) for this PIRE project, Florida International University's (FIU) School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida Atlantic University's (FAU) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and IBM Research Worldwide (China, France, India, Japan, USA), together with the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), Tsinghua University (China), the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), are developing methodologies, platforms, and tools for creating CI applications in a way that eases the application development process and makes the resulting applications more adaptive to future changes of CI. The approach is application-driven and is focused on: (1) supporting CI-enablement for carefully chosen critical application domains, e.g. hurricane mitigation, bioinformatics and healthcare, and (2) developing common methodologies, services and tools for CI-enabled applications in these domains. The technology and tools created by the partners have broad significance and utility to both scientific discovery and industrial/societal applications.
Students from U.S. universities, including underrepresented minorities, are engaged and each participant receives multiple perspectives in each of three different aspects of collaboration as they work with local and international researchers, in academic and industrial research labs, on basic and applied research projects. Consequently, PIRE students are able to participate in the full research pipeline from inception of ideas, through basic research, to practical applications with a wide choice of collaborators and international experiences.
By training a globally engaged workforce and by driving sustainable international partnerships with shared infrastructure and resources, through which faculty, students and industry scientists/engineers collaborate to solve critical and nationally-important complex scientific problems, this activity aims to have a major impact on American competitiveness.
This PIRE project is funded by the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) with co-funding from the Office of Cyber Infrastructure (OCI).
) to use our already established international research collaborations, previously developed under the Latin American Grid (LA Grid) initiative, to promote research, education, and workforce development at major institutions in the USA and other locations around the world. During the course of this project, we established fruitful, collaborative research and education relationships with 33 universities and industrial institutions (BSC, Delft, Eindhoven, FAU, FIU, Gamer7, IBM Research China & India & USA, INRIA Bordeaux, ITESM, Kaseya, McGill, NII, NTU, Paris Descartes, REIN, Tsinghua, TU Darmstadt, UCLM, UdeG, UdR1, UFF, UFG, UM, UMilan, UNCC, Uni-Bamberg, UNLP, UPC, UPF, UPRM, USP, Warsaw, and Yahoo!) in 16 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Taiwan, and United States). Over the course of this project, we recruited 68 students from FIU, FAU, UNCC and UPRM from all levels of Bachelors, Masters, and PhD to travel to the above-mentioned countries and conduct research under the supervision of our international collaborators. Our faculty mentors and student participants produced one patent, 18 PhD dissertations, 17 journal articles, nine book chapters, 66 conference and workshop papers, and 77 posters. The CI-PIRE research research aimed to develop methodologies, platforms, and tools for better enabling CyberInfrastructure (CI) applications in a way that eases the application development process and makes resulting applications more adaptive to future changes of CI. We aimed to realize Transparent Cyberinfrastructure Enablement by addressing the following key challenges: High-level Visual Interactive Development Environments (IDE), Automated Code Generation and Software/Hardware Reuse, and Hiding the Heterogeneity of CI Architectures. To respond to these challenges, we engaged in research projects focused on CI Applications, CI Integration, and CI Enablement. For more information, please visit the PIRE website (http://pire.fiu.edu) that contains the latest updates on research, activities, and events, the CI-PIRE Weblog (http://latinamericangrid.org/elgg/weblog/everyone) that includes the blogs or all our students posted during their international travels, and the YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/cipirevideos) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/cipirecommunity) pages for CI-PIRE that contain the video interviews from our PIRE participants that are all available to the general public.
