The Incus Facility: An Integrated UIC Cyberinfrastructure for High-Performance Computing and Networking

University Of Illinois At Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The project consists of an upgrade to part of the campus network and to the campus' network connection to the Starlight facility. This upgrade is designed to support computer science research in networking, visualization and data-mining, primarily at the University's National Center for Data Mining and Electronic Visualization Laboratory. To that end, the upgraded connection to Starlight will be implemented with 100 Gigabit-per-second networking infrastructure. The renovation will facilitate research on the development and use of cloud computing and cloud data storage. Developing data management and computing services that scale to very large datasets is a fundamental research problem, as is developing services for visualizing and collaboratively analyzing these datasets. The renovated network will also provide researchers on campus with remote access to a new magnetic resonance imaging system as well as facilitating participation in the analysis of data from the Large Hadron Collider. In addition to providing infrastructure for research, the renovation is likely to enable students from under-represented groups to participate in advanced research, since approximately half of the National Center for Data Mining's Ph.D. students come from underrepresented groups and almost half of the supported research assistants in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory come from underrepresented groups.