Cyberinfrastructure

For four decades I have helped develop leading-edge cyberinfrastructure (CI) to support researcher’s applications. My unsolicited NSF proposal in 1983 helped define the need for what became the NSF Supercomputer Center program.  As NCSA Director, I oversaw bringing successive architectures of high-performance computers to the national research community: vectors, massively parallel, shared memory, and finally large-scale superclusters. My partnership with the leaders of UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab enabled us to build a sequence of world-leading capabilities in scientific visualization, virtual reality, telepresence, and collaboratories. Based on these experiences, in 1993 I co-authored a book on the scientific underpinnings of the many disciplines of science and engineering that were being transformed by these computational methodologies.

By 1988 the Internet had enabled building distributed “virtual” computers, forming what I termed “Metacomputers” or later “The Grid.” My 2002 OptIPuter NSF grant demonstrated that wide-area bandwidth of these metacomputers could be as fast as the connected computer’s backplanes, essentially eliminating distance for collaborative Big Data scientific research. In 2015, the NSF funded my Pacific Research Platform (PRP) grant to demonstrate this by using California’s CENIC Regional Optical Network (RON) to interconnect multiple campus systems. Machine learning was added to the PRP in 2017 when NSF funded my Cognitive Hardware and Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure grant. In 2018, NSF funded my Toward the National Research Platform to extend the PRP across the country by federating with four midwestern/eastern RONs and Internet2. In 2023, the PRP was renamed the National Research Platform, led by SDSC.