Cyberinfrastructure may sound like a big word, but it’s an important one for university researchers and IT professionals.
Universities that invest in a solid cyberinfrastructure allow their researchers to do what they do best: research. If they want to send 800 GB of data to a colleague across the country, they don’t have to worry about their bandwidth space. Their infrastructure allows them to conduct different types of research and collaborate with other scientists in ways they might not have been able to do before.
Cyberinfrastructure is a coordinated IT approach that involves computational servers, networks, storage capabilities and visualization devices, said Steve Corbato, the director of cyberinfrastructure strategic initiatives at the University of Utah. It’s all about supporting researchers so that they can digitize and share the massive amounts of data they collect.
For example, researchers on project NEPTUNE, which is lead by the University of Washington, are collecting and monitoring multiple data sets 24/7 from underwater laboratories in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. To help them share and manage data, research universities need robust infrastructure and talented people who can work across various disciplines with a number of different technologies.
At the request of faculty members who had worked at national laboratories, the University of Utah set up a large computational cluster with 2,000 cores — essentially the smallest unit of computing — that can run multiple data processes at once. The cluster ranked 253 on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers in November 2008.
The cyberinfrastructure team set up a campus cyberinfrastructure council to get the faculty’s input and buy-in on current projects, including developing an off-campus data center for the university’s health care system and building an optical network between the center and the campus.
“There’s nothing like a build–it-and-they-will-come type approach,” Corbato said. “I think the days of that are really past … you need your customer base to really provide key direction.”
Researchers at the university can send larger files and complete file transfers more quickly with an Internet2 backbone than they could with the commercial Internet, said Corbato, who worked for the not-for-profit company for six years. Internet2 will also allow the university to deploy higher bandwidth more rapidly with the optical network they’re building.
The Internet2 network runs through various pieces of cyberinfrastructure — including instrumentation, security computation and networking — and allows access to them in a coherent way, said Rick Summerhill, CTO of the company.
Because the network that connects these pieces is so crucial to the infrastructure, universities have to make sure they get good performance out of the network. The University of Utah runs an enterprise network, which connects to a regional network, which in turn connects to Internet2.
“Being able to understand the performance across those particular domains is not a trivial thing to be able to do,” Summerhill said, “but it’s something that we’re very interested in and something that we think is important to do.”
Universities can improve their network performance by using nodes called perfSONAR that can detect and isolate a particular problem in one piece of the network. perfSONAR was developed by collaborating universities and organizations, including Internet2.
Another important piece of cyberinfrastructure is middleware, software that is deployed to selected members. Those members, such as universities, can access information securely from other facilities throughout the world without logging in with a separate password and account for each university they access.
Investing in middleware, network performance and other aspects of cyberinfrastructure ultimately allows universities to serve their faculty and make them more competitive in their fields, Corbato said.
“The university benefits because these faculty are able to compete more successfully for research grants,” he said, “and that brings more research funding into the university.”
