About CyberInfrastructure Partnership

Joint Development & Deployment Activities

NCSA and SDSC collaborate together on a number of activities which benefit the user community and serve to further coordinate center activities. They include middleware development, coordinated data management, and visualization activities.

Middleware Infrastructure

SDSC and NCSA have a long history of working together on grid technologies. Recently, work on NMI, the Grids Center, ETF, and other projects have created a strong cross-center base of experience and expertise in this area. The NCSA/SDSC middleware infrastructure team is responsible for production deployment and interoperability of middleware at the centers.

The cross-center visualization team is focusing its efforts to provide scientists access to a spectrum of HPC visualization capabilities from their desktop. For example, desktop tools are being developed that will allow scientists to interactively visualize large data using cyberinfrastructure HPC resources. A visualization portal is being developed that will enable complex jobs to be submitted and executed using HPC grid technology to produce high quality visualizations. These capabilities allow scientists to access targeted services for producing publication-quality visualizations. Staff at both centers are leveraging existing tools and expertise to create this new infrastructure.

Coordinated Data Services -- The National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research (NLADR)

We face a number of fundamental challenges related to data: creating scalable infrastructures to support integration, search, collaborative exploration, analysis, mining, and visualization of distributed data; mining new types of data, such as streams; developing techniques for archival and long-term preservation of data; measuring the functional and performance capabilities of data algorithms, tools, and frameworks; and standardization of the steps in the data management and analysis processes. To address these issues, we have focused our coordinated activities through the initiation of a cross-center community group, the National Laboratory for Advanced Data Research (NLADR).