INDUSTRY

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has received a grant of $2 million to lead a two-year intensive effort to develop a roadmap for CLEANER, the Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research. The goal of CLEANER is to transform and advance the scientific and engineering knowledge base in order to address the challenges of complex, large-scale, human-stressed environmental systems, such as managing and protecting our nation’s water supplies, restoring altered ecosystems, preserving endangered species, and tracking harmful agents. The vision for CLEANER includes multiple distributed, networked sites where sensors and instruments will gather data, as well as cyberinfrastructure for sharing, storing, managing, analyzing, mining, visualizing, and drawing fresh insights from that data. "Enabling environmental engineers to collaborate on a national networked basis will allow our community to contribute to the solutions of important national and global problems," said Charles Haas, one of three co-directors of the CLEANER planning effort and a professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at Drexel University. “NCSA’s mission is to enable scientific discovery, and we believe that close collaboration with the research communities we serve is the only way to develop, deploy, and support the cyberinfrastructure that will best fit their needs,” said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. “We’re excited by the opportunity CLEANER provides for a long-term partnership with the national environmental science and engineering community.” Over the next two years, the CLEANER project office will coordinate planning efforts, including refining the key science questions and grand challenges to be tackled by CLEANER, developing a unified vision for the facilities and sensor technology required, understanding the cyberinfrastructure requirements, determining how social scientists and economists can be involved in CLEANER, and outlining strategies for the educational component of CLEANER at the K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels. These six focus areas will be tackled by six committees involving researchers and other experts from across the country. At the end of the two-year grant, the collaborators will produce a strategic plan that sets forth a roadmap for CLEANER development. "This project is immensely important to the national environmental research community,” said Barbara Minsker, a co-director of the CLEANER project office and also the leader of NCSA's Environmental Engineering, Science, and Hydrology group and an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC. “We will be defining a research and education agenda and supportive infrastructure that have the potential to dramatically advance our understanding of complex environmental systems." The project office will be led by three co-directors: principal investigator Barbara Minsker; Haas; and Jerald Schnoor, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa. Researchers at other partner institutions, who serve on the executive committee and chair the planning committees, are from Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, Howard University, Humboldt State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Resources for the Future, Texas A&M University, the University of California, and the University of Michigan. The CLEANER planning effort will be headquartered at NCSA’s Access Center in Arlington, Virginia, where an executive director will manage day-to-day operations.