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August 24, 2007
Indiana University Receives $1.9M for Polar Grid Project
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BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Aug. 20 -- Despite the August heat, researchers from Indiana University are about to get a whole lot cooler. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded an IU-led team $1.96 million to create a cyberinfrastructure that will help scientists better understand the current and future state of polar ice sheets.
Under the leadership of Geoffrey C. Fox, director of Pervasive Technology Labs' Community Grids Lab and IU professor of informatics, the project team includes partners from Elizabeth City State University and the University of Kansas' Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets.
NSF funding and additional IU support will be used to create a computer grid spanning from the North to the South Pole. This "Polar Grid" will be comprised of ruggedized laptops and clusters deployed in the field in the polar regions, and also two large scale clusters for detailed data analysis in the U.S. -- a 17 Teraflops cluster to be installed at IU, and a 5 TFLOPS cluster at Elizabeth City State University. The clusters will be made highly accessible through a science gateway, using Web 2.0 and portal approaches designed to make high performance computers easier to use.
"The Polar Grid project will transform U.S. capabilities in ice sheet research," said Fox. "With this technology, it will be possible to collect, examine and analyze data -- and then use the results of such analysis to optimize data collection strategies -- all during the course of a single expedition. This will help scientists more quickly gain understanding about the potential impact of rising sea levels and how they relate to global climate change, a problem of urgent importance."
The Polar Grid represents a dramatic change from the current method of study, in which expeditions occur during the summer months, data is brought back to the U.S. for analysis, and a new expedition takes place the following year.
In addition to impacting polar science, the project builds upon Fox's existing efforts to help minority serving institutions enhance their research by gaining greater access to cyberinfrastructure. The Polar Grid project will provide Elizabeth City State University, a historically black university in North Carolina, with a high performance computing cluster and will give its researchers access to IU's cluster, using a high speed network connection.
"Polar Grid will give Elizabeth City some very powerful and highly advanced, high performance computing equipment," said Matt Link, director of Research Technologies-Systems for University Information Technology Services at Indiana University, who serves as equipment coordinator for the project. "ECSU researchers will have access to cyberinfrastructure that's on par with some of the nation's top colleges and universities."
Linda Hayden, co-principal investigator from Elizabeth City State University, says the Polar Grid project will support student learning by expanding ECSU's existing polar science efforts, as well as providing greater access to and understanding of high performance computers.
"This will give ECSU a top-ranked 5 Teraflop high performance computing system, building on existing distance education and undergraduate laboratory infrastructure, that will enable crucial ice-sheet science and educate a diverse workforce in both polar science and cyberinfrastructure," said Hayden.
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