Thom Dunning, Director, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Professor and Distinguished Chair for Research Excellence, Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Radha Nandkumar, Senior Research Scientist
Program Director, International Affiliations and Campus Relations
National Center for Supercomputing Applications

Cyberinfrastructure is now essential for advancing scientific discovery and the state-of-the-art in engineering. It doesn't matter whether it's the inner workings of the universe or the inner workings of the economy, the design of a new chemical process or the design of a new material, new insights into how cells function or the delivery of personalized medicine, the spawning of a tornado or planning urban development. The basic fact remains the same — cyberinfrastructure is now a driver of science and engineering. Without it, science and engineering will not reach their full potential.

But, science and engineering is a global activity. There is not an American chemistry and a French chemistry, nor is there a Japanese electrical engineering and a Brazilian electrical engineering. Scientists and engineers around the globe are focused on unraveling the secrets of nature and applying this hard gained knowledge to the betterment of humanity. Cyberinfrastructure must support this global activity. In fact, it is our belief that cyberinfrastructure, properly designed and constructed, will advance science and engineering as a global activity by facilitating access to resources and expertise wherever they are located.

There are three intertwined strands of a global infrastructure:

Cyberenvironments:  to provide researchers with the ability to access, integrate, automate, and manage complex, collaborative projects across disciplinary as well as geographical boundaries.

Cyber-resources:  to ensure that the most demanding scientific and engineering problems can be solved and that the solutions are obtained in a timely manner.

Cybereducation:  to ensure that the benefits of the national cyberinfrastructure are made available to educators and students throughout the country and the world.

NSF's latest version of “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery” was released on January 20, 2006. One of the guiding principles in this vision is “national and international partnerships, public and private, that integrate CI users and providers and benefit NSF's research and education communities are … essential for enabling next-generation science and engineering.”

During his keynote address2 at NCSA's 20th Anniversary Celebration in January 2006 entitled, “Un-common sense: A recipe for a cyber planet,” Dr. Arden Bement, Director of the National Science Foundation, remarked that “cyberinfrastructure will take research and education to a new plane of discovery. It is critical for advancing knowledge in the face of a dynamic and changing global technological environment.” In discussing issues related to global competition and sustaining the long history of technological leadership that the US has enjoyed, Dr. Bement provided some uncommon-sense advice: “We should pursue more global involvement, not less. The rapid spread of computers and information tools compels us to join hands across borders and disciplines if we want to stay in the race.”

CTWatch Quarterly invited articles from several key influential trend-setters across the globe and asked them to provide their vision for cyberinfrastructure in their respective environs and for extending them in an international context. (The November 2005 issue of CTWatch Quarterly focused on cyberinfrastructure in Europe.)

There are eight articles describing activities in Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, and the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA).

The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) leads the Australian National Grid Program. John O'Callaghan describes the APAC and its vision for providing advanced computing, information and grid infrastructure for the Australian research community through the APAC National Grid Program. This program encompasses the national facilities at APAC and the distributed partner sites, supporting distributed research on national and international levels. As you will read, the advanced communication infrastructure that is in place in Australia offers many opportunities for international collaborations.

Brazilian efforts are described by Marco Raupp et. al in “Cyberinfrastructure supporting multidisciplinary science in Brazil.” The authors provide a short history of the high-end computing and the national networking infrastructures, discuss the recent upgrades and the current environment that exists, highlight activities in the development of cyberenvironments, and touch upon some critical applications.

India's emerging nation-wide computational grid “GARUDA,” which aims to aggregate distributed resources of research and academic institutions, is described by Mohan Ram and S. Ramakrishnan. The article describes the architecture and the major components of GARUDA — the grid resources, network, middleware, data management, and portals. The authors also point to a couple of sample applications of national importance in India — sensor networks and bioinformatics — that will be tackled using this infrastructure.

Japan's Cyber Science Infrastructure (CSI) — the next generation academic information environment, coordinated by the National Institute of Informatics in collaboration with Japanese universities and academic institutions — is described by Masao Sakauchi et al. They describe Japan's academic networking and National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI) as well as the provision of academic digital content for CSI.

Korea's effort in the construction and utilization of cyberinfrastructure and its current status is described by Hyeongwoo Park et al. The phenomenal strides in broadband deployment and adoption in Korea and the advantages it provides for establishing a grid infrastructure, supporting middleware development, and for undertaking cutting-edge research in grids are described. The authors also discuss some sample e-Science projects.

South Africa's article, “HPC in South Africa: Computing is support of African Development” by Rob Adam et al., describes the objectives and structure of the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) as an arm of the Meraka Institute that facilitates needs-based research and innovation. They discuss current progress in the establishment of CHPC, and its implications for linking research and innovation in addressing the needs of the South African society and economy with further reach into the continent of Africa and the world.

“The Taiwan Cyberinfrastructure for Knowledge Innovation” article by Whey-Fone Tsai et al. addresses how Taiwan's twin projects, Knowledge Innovation National Grid (KING) and Advanced Research and Education Network (TWAREN), form the kernel of Taiwan's cyberinfrastructure and enable science and engineering innovation. The authors describe their development and deployment efforts in the various components of the cyberinfrastructure and in enabling grid applications in sensor networks and in ecological and environmental domains as well as community health.

Last but not least, in “PRAGMA: Example of Grass-Roots Grid Promoting Collaborative e-Science Teams,” Peter Arzberger and Phil Papadopoulos outline the unique membership-partnership activities under the auspices of PRAGMA – the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly. They illustrate the potential of bringing resources, tools and research teams from around the world to create, support and sustain international science and technology collaboration, and the challenges associated with making this a reality on a routine basis. PRIME and PRIUS are some of the major activities spearheaded by PRAGMA that involve the next generation of students.

Enabling innovation and breakthrough science seem to be unifying themes across all institutions. Applications with a broader societal impact — health and human life, drug design and discovery, bioinformatics, weather forecasting, climate change, environmental modeling, disaster management and mitigation, natural language processing, collecting, analyzing, mining and visualizing large volumes of data, and so on — are where most of the demands and interest in the development and establishment of cyberinfrastructure rest.

This article was provided courtesy of CTWatch. To read the complete issue of CTWatch Quarterly describing international cyberinfrastructure, visit http://www.ctwatch.org/quarterly/.