CC*DNI Engineer: Cyberinfrastructure Engineer at Case Western Reserve University

Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland OH

Investigators

Abstract

Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) has made significant investment in its campus cyberinfrastructure to support research that is increasingly compute-, data-, and network-intensive. The NSF-funded Cyberinfrastructure Engineer (CIE) collaborates closely with researchers to understand their needs and guide their use of cyberinfrastructure to ensure optimal benefit, and also works with university network engineers to make architectural, design, and configuration changes to the cyberinfrastructure to better serve the research community and ensure they are able to fully leverage local, regional, and national cyberinfrastructure. The CIE is part of an emerging program that embeds staff from the university's Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure (RCCI) unit within key research groups to provide a liaison between these groups and to provide collaborative technical support for their needs in cyberinfrastructure, including high performance computing, data-intensive computing, private cloud, peta-scale storage, and end-to-end network performance. The CIE engages not only with CWRU research groups, but also with their collaborators at other institutions to ensure the optimal use of cyberinfrastructure resources at all institutions and along the network paths that link them. Such activity is a critically important success factor as researchers tackle increasingly large problems and collaborate in geographically distributed research teams, and as they work to converge data-intensive and numerically intensive computing within the National Strategic Computing Initiative. Finally, the CIE participates in formal classroom presentations to students who rely on campus cyberinfrastructure in their research and learning experience in STEM education. At CWRU, the CIE has primary responsibility for the university Science DMZ , perfSONAR, and data transfer node services. As the Science DMZ is tightly integrated with the university's high performance computing, data-intensive computing, private cloud, peta-scale online research storage, and near-line research data archive services, the CIE's responsibility extends into all areas of campus cyberinfrastructure and requires close coordination and collaboration with staff having primary responsibility in those areas. To ensure optimal end-to-end network performance, the CIE routinely works in collaboration with peers at other universities, government institutions, and regional and national networking organizations including Internet2, the Ohio Academic and Research Network, Ohio Supercomputing Center, NIH facilities such as NCBI, DoE facilities such as ORNL, and the NSF-funded national supercomputer centers. The CIE is involved in the university's efforts in IPv6, identity and access management, SDN, and OpenFlow, and works closely with information security and the network security groups.