Purdue University

Members of the Purdue community looking to advance research and research collaborations, win grant funding, or enhance students’ classroom experience should find new ways of doing so in the technological resources to be highlighted at Purdue CI Days 2010 on Dec. 8-9.

Registration opens Oct. 15 for the CI Days event, which will focus on how just about any faculty member, research staffer, or graduate student can benefit from the University’s cyberinfrastructure, or CI. Participants from any field are welcome.

For more information on CI Days 2010 and to register, visit cidays@purdue.edu. The registration deadline is Nov. 29.

Featured speakers include University of Illinois Professor Donna Cox, an internationally known scientific visualization expert at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and an Academy Award nominee, and Arden Bement Jr., former director of the National Science Foundation now head of Purdue’s Global Policy Research Institute.

CI Days 2010 also will include presentations from other CI experts and from faculty already taking advantage of CI to:

• Make research projects more attractive for grant funding.
• Build online communities for collaboration, teaching and research—with access to real computational research tools from a Web browser.
• Mine research data ranging from genomes to all the text and text revisions of Wikipedia.
• Harness students’ Facebook and Twitter habits as a teaching tool.

Cyberinfrastructure refers to inter-linked systems of advanced computing power, networks, storage, graphic display capabilities, and remote research instrumentation and sensors. CI also includes related software and virtual organizations for online collaboration and education.

Purdue’s cyberinfrastructure ranges from cutting-edge supercomputers for the most demanding computational research to tools of potential benefit to any faculty member, such as Hotseat, and Signals. Hotseat integrates student Twitter and Facebook posts into classroom discussions, while Signals is a system for tracking a student’s progress in a class and getting those who need assistance help before they reach a point of no return.

Through ITaP, Purdue also offers HUBzero, a Swiss Army Knife for deploying and accessing computational research codes, and visualizing and analyzing results, all through a familiar Web browser interface. The hub technology makes posting software tools for doing real research about as easy as posting a YouTube video. Meanwhile, built-in social networking features akin to Facebook create communities of researchers and educators in science, engineering, medicine, almost any field or subject matter and facilitate online collaborations and presentation of lectures and other educational materials, along with research results.

ITaP’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing also offers DiaGrid, a distributed computing system with 30,000 processors available to any campus researcher. Data storage and handling; data visualization; real-time satellite and remote sensing data acquisition and processing; virtual reality and motion capture are other examples of cyberinfrastructure services offered by ITaP.

ITaP’s expert staff operates the systems and provides user support, consults on research and educational computing needs, including software development, and assists with grant proposals.