ICS Infrastructure
CyberSTAR – Broader Impact
CyberSTAR – A Scalable Terascale Advanced Resource for Discovery through Computing
National Science Foundation: Major Research Instrumentation, Office of CyberInfrastructure
Award Number #0821527
The broader impact of our research activities stems from the dissemination of outcomes to the broader science communities. Contributions include models and benchmarks for computer system research, CiteSeerx – a citation indexing and collaboration system, tools for materials design, community science databases such as ChemXSeer, GALAXY – a bioinformatics tool and contact networks and disease dynamics models. Together, they represent significant contributions toward enhanced cyber–infrastructure for research and education with the potential for direct impact on thousands of users across all the disciplines represented in our projects. The proposed instrument will also enable, host and sustain significant cyber–infrastructure for engineering design, impacting over 12,000 students. We will co–develop and co–teach new courses with hands-on "virtual experiments" for engaging the next generation of students in discovery through computing with estimated student enrollments of 700 over the three year period. Additionally, we will engage our industrial partners in collaborative research, education and training. To broaden participation toward a diverse workforce, we offer a series of pipeline building activities centered around the instrument which will be incorporated into existing regional and national scale programs at Penn State. These activities seek to (1) engage students from underrepresented communities and youth at risk, from high–school through graduate school, (2) enhance resources for teacher training and (3) enable greater access to adolescents with mild disabilities through new data fusion tools to easily access available services.