Enabling Minority Serving Institutes to be Cyberinfrastructure Resource Providers

August 7 - 10, 2006

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is the coordinated aggregate of software, middleware, hardware, and other technologies (as well as human expertise) that is required to support current and future discoveries in science and engineering. Considerable expertise is required to provide effective and efficient CI resources that enable researchers to take advantage of the advanced capabilities CI offers.

Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) have common issues across their diverse communities that are recognized as barriers to participation in cyberinfrastructure enabled research and engineering. One of these barriers is their lack of tools and infrastructure needed to participate in mainstream research, which has perpetuated the the growing gap in technology, called the digital divide, between mainstream institutions and many MSIs . One solution for narrowing this gap is to enable MSIs to become providers of CI resources that can be used at their own institutions or shared with others in the worldwide research community.

NCSA is a leading center providing CI resources to the science and engineering research community. This workshop shared this expertise, along with the expertise of other leading CI resource providers, with members of the MSI community to enable them to go beyond using CI resources but to also become fully engaged in CI by being providers of those resources.

Presentation Materials :

• Welcome and Workshop Overview
• Lessons learned from the MSI CI2 June Institute
• Panel: What is a Resource Provider?
• Facility Requirements and Building the Physical Resources
• Configuration, Acquisition and Support of Computational Resources
• Sharing resources – setting policy and coordination
• Security Overview
• CI Software and Application Support
  • Managing Biomolecular Simulations in a Grid Environment with NAMD-G
  • Grid Application Development
• LA Grid
• Open Science Grid - OSG
• Building a Campus Grid for Research & Education: UT Grid
• Grids at Indiana University
• TeraGrid Overview
• TeraGrid Campus Partnerships
• Community Building Efforts at NUCRI

Point of Contact:

If you have questions regarding this event, please contact the NCSA Training Group.