Aims Education Foundation

$121 million project aims to improve digital resources for researchers

URBANA — A new $121 million project led by the University of Illinois will help researchers collaborate in a secure environment, while focusing on their work rather than the technology behind it.

The National Science Foundation is providing the funding over five years — with an option to renew for another five— so that a powerful but more cumbersome knowledge grid, TeraGrid, can be replaced with a new, seamless one.

John Towns of the UI's National Center for Supercomputing Applications is the project leader and principal investigator for the partnership of 17 institutions in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment.

Shortened to XSEDE, it promises to be "the most advanced, powerful and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world."

Towns, who was also a leader in the TeraGrid project, said the older project, started more than a decade ago, helped thousands of scientists to complete thousands of research projects, at no cost to the scientists.

XSEDE can help even more scientists, he said, by removing obstacles inherent to using different technologies.

"By its nature, TeraGrid focused on folks capable of using very high-end and advanced systems," Towns said.

Instead of focusing on technology, XSEDE focuses on the researchers themselves, the project director said.

Everything will be multiplatform and more transparent to use in XSEDE, Towns said, helping researchers who don't have all the latest devices and software a supercomputing center does.

In his example, three research groups are collaborating on a project.

Two of them have outstanding clusters of technology, and the third has a fantastic database to share with them. XSEDE will allow them all to work at the same level (and in security) to create a virtual lab.

Multiple computers connected by high-speed network mean that data don't have to be moved from site to site, or worry about which cluster is busy, Towns said.

"This will really enhance the productivity of researchers," he said.

"Over the last few years (and since TeraGrid) there have been a variety of efforts in remote and integrated access, a lot of very interesting things. Researchers will spend a lot less time messing around with 'where's my data and what resources do I have access to.'"

As with TeraGrid, the collaborative computing will help with large simulations, such as weather forecasting, manipulation of data and in scientific imaging.

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Established in 2003, the HEF was created to enhance the work of the Howell Public Schools. Since its creation it has donated more than $80,000 toward special programs for students, including field trips, science camps and educational equipment for classrooms. A current project is the two-story house the HEF purchased for renovation by high school Building and Trades students. In past years the Foundation funded a hovercraft project for students, provided state-of-the-art cameras for photography classes, and purchased overhead projector systems for both middle schools.

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