ICS Infrastructure
CyberSTAR - Intellectual Merits
CyberSTAR – A Scalable Terascale Advanced Resource for Discovery through Computing
National Science Foundation: Major Research Instrumentation, Office of CyberInfrastructure
Award Number #0821527
The proposed instrument will form the sustainable core of a multidisciplinary collaborative discovery and learning ecosystem – an ecosystem where "computational thinking", encompassing methods, models, algorithms and systems, can be applied collaboratively to address challenges in seven major areas including: computer and information science and engineering; the biological, materials and social sciences; engineering, education and geoscience. Despite the diversity of the research areas, the projects share a common theme of enabling discovery through computing which, in turn, demands that they address and overcome computational scalability challenges. Our goal is to enable transformative multidisciplinary research to address the challenges of scaling at multiple levels, for example, by advancing foundational concepts in algorithm design and parallelism, to enable intrinsic scaling of applications, or the optimization of the architecture for instrument scaling. More importantly, we propose a fourth synergistic scaling approach where these three modes of scaling can be composed to benefit multiple applications within the relatively short three–year period of the project. We also propose a set of integrated research and education activities to foster interaction among project participants toward collaborative scaling, i.e., the transfer of successful scaling approaches from one domain into another.
This project is supported by the Major Research Instrumentation Program from the National Science Foundation through Award Number #0821527 and several Penn State units including the Office of the Sr. Vice President for Research, the Institute for CyberScience, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the Materials Research Institute, the College of Engineering, the Eberly College of Science, the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Information Technology Services.