Cyberinfrastructure

Cyberinfrastructure has been best defined as “the coordinated aggregate of software, hardware and other technologies, as well as human expertise, required to support current and future discoveries in science and engineering. The challenge of Cyberinfrastructure is to integrate relevant and often disparate resources to provide a useful, usable, and enabling framework for research and discovery characterized by broad access and “end-to-end” coordination”. While infrastructure in the past has typically applied to tangible items such as train tracks, power lines, or water pipes, cyberinfrastructure represents not only hardware, but also software, services, personnel, and organizations required to create leaps in scientific progress by removing barriers to accessing high performance computing. Cyberinfrastructure  describes the new research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services over networks. Often viewed in layers, Cyberinfrastructure has fundamental computing technologies (processing, storage, communication) at the bottom most layer, and community specific knowledge environments for research and education (collaboratories, e-science communities) at the top layer. The challenge lies in the creation of the services between these two layers, often referred to as “middleware”.

Faculty Contacts: Goran Konjevod, Sandeep Gupta