INDUSTRY

San Diego -- The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) will help design and develop the information technology (IT) underpinnings for tomorrow's research in the geosciences, environmental science, biology, and other fields by playing a key role in six Information Technology Research (ITR) initiatives announced today by the National Science Foundation (NSF). These awards are designed to support "visionary work" that could lead to major advances in IT and its applications. Four of the projects involve large $5 million-plus ITR awards, among only seven highly competitive such awards made. SDSC is also participating in two medium-sized ITR awards. "Tomorrow's scientific breakthroughs depend critically on the advances we make in today's information infrastructure," said Fran Berman, director of SDSC and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). "Each of these ITR projects will leverage SDSC and NPACI experience and technologies to lay the groundwork for new discoveries in the Earth sciences, biology, and other disciplines. Such new science requires collaborative research to bring together new tools, new ideas, and powerful IT infrastructure." SDSC is the lead institution in the Geosciences Network (GEON), an $11.25 million award, and is participating as data component lead in the $12.25 million Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) program, led by the University of New Mexico. SDSC is providing grid and cluster computing experience to the $13.5 million OptIPuter project led by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies, Cal-(IT)2, and contributing computational experience and resources in UCSD's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, a $10.5-million program. Half of the funding for the Center for Theoretical Biological Physics is through the NSF Physics Frontier Centers program. These four projects are five-year large awards under the NSF ITR program. The two medium-sized ITR awards that SDSC is part of are the $2.9 million Monitoring Civil Infrastructure effort and the $3 million Network Framework project. Geosciences Network The GEOsciences Network (GEON) project is a collaboration between IT and geoscience researchers with the goal of creating a modern information technology framework for the earth sciences. IT research is coordinated by Chaitan Baru of SDSC, and colleagues Bertram Ludäscher, Phil Papadopoulos, and Mike Bailey, as well as scientists from Pennsylvania State University and San Diego State University. Geoscience research coordinated by A. Krishna Sinha of Virginia Tech includes 10 additional universities (Arizona State University, Bryn Mawr College, Cornell University, Rice University, University of Arizona, University of Idaho, University of Missouri, University of Texas, El Paso, University of Utah, and UNAVCO). The Digital Library for Earth Sciences Education (DLESE) will lead the GEON education and outreach program. A major partner in GEON is the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which will collaborate in building broader access through GEON to selected USGS national scale geological databases. "GEON will seamlessly integrate USGS data with those of the broader geoscience community," said Charles G. Groat, USGS Director. "And this will significantly speed the pace of geological research." (For more on GEON, see www.geongrid.org or daks.sdsc.edu/geon). Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge The SEEK project involves a multidisciplinary team of ecologists, computer scientists, and technologists from the Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics (PBI), a consortium consisting of University of New Mexico (UNM); SDSC, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Kansas; as well as partner institutions Arizona State University, University of North Carolina, University of Vermont, and Napier University in Scotland. SEEK will provide ecologists and other researchers access to a large-scale network of information resources and computational services. The project will provide fundamental improvements in how researchers can gain global access to data and information, rapidly locate and use distributed computational services, and exercise powerful new methods for capturing, reproducing, and extending the analysis process itself. (For more on SEEK go to http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/). OptIPuter Led by Larry Smarr, director of Cal-(IT)2, the OptIPuter project will explore next-generation distributed cyber "infostructure" to support scientific research and collaboration. Initial application efforts will be in biomedical imaging and geoscience research, including environmental, seismic, and remote sensing. UCSD and the University of Illinois at Chicago will lead the research team, in partnership with Northwestern University, San Diego State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Irvine [a partner of UCSD in Cal-(IT)2]. SDSC will provide grid and cluster computing experience, as well as facilities and services, including access to the NSF-funded TeraGrid. Co-principal investigators on the project include UCSD's Mark Ellisman and SDSC's Philip Papadopoulos. The OptIPuter research will be carried out in close conjunction with two data-intensive e-science efforts already underway, the NSF-funded EarthScope, and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network, funded by the National Institutes of Health, which will provide applications to test the OptIPuter design. "Because of our emphasis on geosciences applications, we also plan to work in close collaboration with the GEON project," said principal investigator Larry Smarr, who is also a UCSD professor of Computer Science and Engineering in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering. (For more information go to www.calit2.net). Center for Theoretical Biological Physics Scientists at UCSD and SDSC are creating a new NSF-funded Center for Theoretical Biological Physics to be the world's leading center in the emerging field of theoretical biological physics. Co-directed by Jose N. Onuchic and Herbert Levine, professors of physics at UCSD, and managed by the university's Division of Physical Sciences, the new center will use the theoretical tools of physics to understand the fundamental principles governing complex biological systems. This joint effort by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and biologists at UCSD and scientists at neighboring institutions in La Jolla will examine the underlying mechanisms governing complex biological systems, while allowing physicists to develop new principles and models based on complex biological phenomena. "SDSC will participate in this groundbreaking program in three ways," said SDSC's Kim Baldridge, a co-PI for the award. "We will contribute molecular-level quantum chemistry algorithmic integration, knowledge and support efforts in hardware infrastructure, and education and outreach." Network Framework SDSC's Amarnath Gupta and Jacobs School computer science professor Fan Chung Graham are co-PIs on a project to develop a framework to analyze, model, and design robust, complex networks using biological and computational principles. The Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences is the lead institution on this medium-sized ITR award. Monitoring Civil Infrastructure SDSC's Tony Fountain is part of an interdisciplinary effort led by Jacobs School structural engineer Ahmed Elgamal to create an integrated framework for real-time health monitoring of highway bridges and other civil infrastructure to detect both sudden and gradually accumulating damage. A flexible and scalable software architecture to which Fountain will contribute data mining capabilities will integrate real-time data from thousands of sensors as well as other heterogeneous inputs.