News for and about the Internet2 community

["Lauren B. Kallens" <>]

New Cyberinfrastructure Partnership Launches Publication

Contact:
Greg Lund
San Diego Supercomputer Center
858-534-8314


Trish Barker
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
217-265-8013


FEBRUARY 17, 2005--The Cyberinfrastructure Partnership (CIP), a joint,
NSF-funded effort of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), this week launched
Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch, http://www.ctwatch.org/).

CTWatch is an online source of news, analysis, and commentary that aims to
keep the national science and engineering research communities informed on,
and involved in, the latest developments in shared cyberinfrastructure.
Developed at the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) at the University of
Tennessee, Knoxville, under the leadership of ICL Director Jack Dongarra,
CTWatch will offer its first quarterly issue on February 18.  A companion
blog, designed as a community forum for breaking news, provocative ideas,
and interactive discussion, is slated for March. 

Each issue of CTWatch will center on a topic with currency and importance
for the broad collection of communities and groups who are interested in
cyberinfrastructure.  The inaugural issue focuses on "Trends in High
Performance Computing."  In the first  issue, Susan Graham, computer science
professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mark Snir,
head of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's computer science
department, summarize and highlight the key elements of the recent report of
the National Research Council on the future of supercomputing. In addition,
the leaders of the Top500 team offer incisive analysis of the results of
their latest survey. Dan Reed, director of the University of North
Carolina's Renaissance Computing Institute, provides a community update on
the influential work of the Presidential Information Technology Advisory
Committee (PITAC); and Microsoft's Jim Gray and his colleagues argue for a
new paradigm for data-intensive computational science.

CTWatch is part of a coordinated endeavor by SDSC and NCSA to help define,
create, and deploy a national cyberinfrastructure for science and
engineering research. The need for an infrastructure to support
next-generation research has never been greater. As the NSF Blue Ribbon
Panel on Cyberinfrastructure concluded in 2003, emerging  multi-disciplinary
research environments and advanced science and engineering applications
require a massive assemblage of hardware, software, and people. Moreover,
organizations will need to work together to coordinate the shared use of
computers, storage, networking, instruments, and visualization technologies
serving a wide variety of communities.


The SDSC-NCSA response to this critical need is the Cyberinfrastructure
Partnership (CIP), a collaboration between the two centers that will provide
a model for close cooperation in building a national cyberinfrastructure. 

"The size of the computational problems to be solved and the amounts of data
being generated and consumed are all growing explosively," said Thom
Dunning, director of NCSA. "Collaborative research at such scales will push
both the component technologies and the design integration problems of
cyberinfrastructure to their limits."

"We intend CTWatch to provide stimulating and thoughtful ideas from the
frontier of cyberinfrastructure," said Fran Berman, director of SDSC. "As
Cyberinfrastructure evolves, CTWatch can provide a venue for describing and
discussing emerging cyberinfrastructure technologies, trends and
opportunities, and serve as forum for the larger community involved in
building and using cyberinfastructure."


Jack Dongarra, executive editor of CTWatch, noted that the creation of the
publication presents a unique opportunity. "Cyberinfrastructure is
especially exciting because innovative computing research, cutting-edge
technology, and groundbreaking science all converge there.  CTWatch
represents a new grass-roots approach to engaging the research community by
showcasing specific areas of computing research and their potential impact
on the scientific community at large."

Visit the CTW site at http://www.ctwatch.org/
Related links:
 www.ncsa.uiuc.edu
 www.sdsc.edu