A Model for LACCEI: Minority Serving Institutions and CyberInfrastructure Research/ Education, Minority Serving Institutions-CyberInfrastructure Empowerment Coalition (MSI-CIEC)

Published in: Innovation and Development for the Americas: Engineering, Education, Research and Development: Proceedings of the 8th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology
Date of Conference: June 1-4, 2010
Location of Conference: Arequipa, Peru
Authors: Richard A. Alo
Karl Barnes
Diane Baxter
Julie Foertsch
Geoffrey Fox
Al Kuslikulis
Alex Ramirez
Refereed Paper: #65

Abstract

Institutions within the Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions lack sufficient resources and knowledge to take significant advantage of national and international computational resources available to advance computational science research and education. Such institutions, just like the USA’s Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), can provide a critical yet untapped human resource potential. The US National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid has attempted to define, promote and deliver an integrated set of high performance computing resources to the US academic research community. However, a gap persists in the connections between the TeraGrid program and non-TeraGrid national computational resources and data. For MSIs and other users, these circumstances hinder seamless, natural use of resources from local, campus infrastructure through national and international high performance computing research tools. In spite of impressive TeraGrid advances, its user community falls short of engaging a much broader potential community such as the MSI community. This paper promotes a campus-based integrated CyberInfrastructure (CI) to bridge this gap. Such can provide new dimensions to an institution’s contributions to its national commitments especially in areas such as human and economic development and security.