Great Plains Network Consortium

1
Great Plains Network Consortium

• Greg Monaco, Ph.D.
• Director for Research, Great Plains Network
• Research Assistant Professor, Kansas State
  University
• greg_at_greatplains.net

2
GPN Member States

• Arkansas
• Kansas
• Nebraska
• Oklahoma
• Missouri
• North Dakota
• South Dakota

3
GPN Vision

• Enhance competitiveness and economic benefit by
  providing leadership in advanced high performance
  applications and network technologies to enable
  the Great Plains region to lead in innovative
  learning/educational environments and
  collaborative research.

4
Regional Strengths

• Excellent faculty and institutions
• History of working together cooperatively
• Large scale issues which stretch our thinking

5
Regional Challenges

• No central, regional guidance bottom-up efforts
• National initiatives
• TeraGrid
• National LambdaRail (NLR)
• Making contacts and staying connected
• Easier to walk across campus

6
GPN brings

• History of successful collaborations
• Technology
• Leveraging assets
• Facilitation of initiatives where domain science
  and computer science come together

7
Current Projects

• Middleware
• Grid Computing
• Condor Pool
• Hydrology Cyberinfrastructure
• Networking Infrastructure
• Education Technology
• International Projects

8
Research Collaboration

• Cross-discipline
• Regional
• National
• International

9
Collaboration drivers

• Improved telecommunications Internet/Internet2
• Increased computational power
• Distributed Resources
• Grid Computing (e-Science)
• Distributed data, people, instruments
• K-20 connectivity
• The problem scale is changing
• Collaboration is often an essential key to
  funding

10
The Collaborative Vision

• build an effective research base that will
  eventually lead to competitive research
  applications from multidisciplinary research
  teams (NIH)

11
Benefits of Collaboration

• Better use of existing resources
• Improved research outcomes
• Feeds into the undergraduate/graduate education
  experience
• Research stability
• Attractive to new faculty and students
• Fosters ideas for future research

12
Emerging Collaborations...

• Physics (GRiPHyN)
• Hydrologic Observatories (HO)
• Biomedical
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Music
• Earthquake Engineering
• Marine Biology
• Education/Learning

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Collaboration Techniques

• Data Application Sharing
• Virtual Private Organization
• Conferencing
• Data Sharing/ Mining
• Distributed (super) computing
• Remote Consultation

• Remote Instrumentation
• Simulation
• Smart Instruments
• Tele-immersion
• Video Streaming
• Virtual Laboratory
• Virtual Reality

14
Collaboration Tools...

• Foot
• Phone
• Desktop Camera/Access Grid
• Condor/Globus
• Software Tools to Promote Collaboration
• Virtual Machine Room - NCSA

15
Enabling Collaboration

• Researchers can
• Start a campus collaboration
• Start an inter-institution collaboration
• Join an existing collaboration
• Institution can
• Raise visibility of existing collaborations
• Local and National/International
• Be prepared to seed emerging collaborations
• Encourage planning grants
• Encourage cross-training (faculty/students)

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Final Words

• Get to know your Program Directors
• Participate in the process.
• 60 of rewritten/resubmitted proposals are
  funded
• We cannot close what you do not propose.

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• Upcoming Events
• Regional Hydrology Cyberinfrastructure, February
  25, 2005 (Lawrence, KS) NSF Program Director
• Multicast Workshop, March 2005 (North Dakota)
• GPN Annual Meeting Lighting the Path Across the
  Great Plains Networking, Middleware Grid
  Computing, June 9 10, 2005 (Kansas City, MO)
• http//research.greatplains.net
• greg_at_greatplains.net