CI-ACT is the newest NJEDge.Net working group, organized to promote and facilitate an understanding of advanced computing technologies and develop methodologies to share high performance computing resources among NJEDge members, of which NJIT is one. Whether your interest lies in the physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences or the arts as an educator, researcher or simply have a professional development goal, high performance computing (HPC) is likely to play an increasingly prominent role in your academic life. Plans are underway to launch a pilot environment to demonstrate shared member access to HPC resources available at our research institutions. The CI-ACT mission is to promote HPC for the NJEDge community - it is not restricted solely to the research sector.  Please consider joining this new working group which is Co-Chaired by David Perel (from NJIT), Les Michelson, and Eric Marshall.

Call for Participation

Did you miss the Cyberinfrastructure workshop at the NJEDge.Net Annual Conference this year? We will forgive you and invite you to attend the inaugural session of CI - ACT, a new NJEDge Working Group. Our mission is to facilitate a broader understanding of advanced computing technologies and to foster the development of strategies to incorporate them into research, professional development and teaching pursuits. While the CI – ACT mission is yet to be finalized and will, indeed, evolve to serve the vision and needs of its constituents, several topics have already been proposed for preliminary discussion:

• Identify and propose candidate resources across the membership as a starting point in creating a shareable computing environment capable of exploiting NJ EDge.Net’s advanced and evolving network infrastructure
• Assist faculty to learn more about advanced computing as a professional development opportunity
• Investigate opportunities for centrally managed, hosted and/or brokered services including co-location through NJ EDge.Net
• Identify  funding opportunities to subsidize collaborative advanced computing programs
• Provide a forum to discuss new hardware and software technologies
• Identify sophisticated laboratory instrumentation as candidates for “collaboratory-” type environments
• Develop  plans to implement a federated identity management capability to facilitate inter-institutional access to advanced computing and related resources
• Identify individuals or groups at the member institutions who are expert in discipline specific areas of computation in the hard, biological and social sciences and are willing to form mutually beneficial partnerships
• Develop comprehensive resource of educational materials on advanced computing technologies including online courses available through national programs such as Teragrid as well as workshops and whitepapers available from NJ EDge members
• Development of a long range plan to establish a shared terascale computing facility of the magnitude anticipated by the NSF for state and regional consortiums

CI – ACT hopes to create interest and participation across all of the higher education disciplines. To be successful CI – ACT needs members from all sectors and technology interests to join us.

Please reply to Adrian Levins@njedge.net with your name, institution and e-mail address if you would like to receive an invitation to the 1st meeting of this new working group to help forge the CI-ACT mission.