US-EA CENTRA: US - East Asia Collaborations to Enable Transnational Cyberinfrastructure Applications

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports collaborative cyberinfrastructure (CI) research activities designed to educate a new generation of researchers who are technically and culturally competent to engage with international scientific networks. The goal of this project is to advance the scientific understanding of distributed software-defined cyberinfrastructures and the ability to run scientific applications using data and tools in different countries. Specifically, the targeted applications are in environmental modeling, disaster management and smart cities, focusing on how these domains impact each other. The related middleware research seeks solutions for software-defined data sharing, middleware interoperability via software-definition, and coordinated software-definition of distributed IT systems. This project pursues rigorous understanding and solution of the scientific problems via international collaborations which bring out real-world contexts of transnational applications and create transnational cyberinfrastructure instances where researchers get practical insight. Junior U.S. Ph.D. candidate researchers are expected to have short stays at collaborating sites in different countries working on project-related topics and have direct access to leading-edge facilities, local instances of global problems and top scientists working on these problems. At the same time they are immersed in international team activities. Annual workshops help conceptualize, frame, advance and report on collaborative research projects and contribute to establishing the coordination framework. Key institutional partners in East Asia include the National Center for High-Performance Computing of the National Applied Research Laboratories of Taiwan and the National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies of Japan. This project is to contribute towards a framework to coordinate CI-based and CI-enabled research with East Asian partners in order to achieve scientific progress and engage junior researchers in international activities.