iPlant's Cyberinfrastructure: Part Facebook, Part Supercomputer

by John Brown


The backbone of the iPlant Collaborative is the cyberinfrastructure that will facilitate the joining of ideas and people. This community of scientists will use Web-based applications to combine and analyze datasets in new, more meaningful ways.

In April 2008, nearly 200 plant, computer, and information scientists from around the world met at Cold Spring Laboratory in New York to discuss the grand challenge problems in plant biology and the computing capabilities the project requires to tackle them.

The physical "brains" of the operation - computer servers, data warehouses, and high-speed networking hardware for iPlant - are being developed under the supervision of Gregory Andrews, Ph.D, UA professor and interim head of the Department of Computer Science.

The software - a hybrid of existing and specially designed applications - will support "'discovery environments' that allow biologists to seamlessly access and link previous silos of data and analytical techniques together for advanced modeling and analyses," says Sudha Ram, Ph.D, McClelland professor of management information systems at the UA.

 


"It's match.com for scientists - each new finding or discovery will be visible to the online community of researchers. The more findings you share, the more discoveries you can make." — Sudha Ram, McClelland professor of management information systems
 

The goal is to maximize the strengths of computer and human thinking power to foster a multidisciplinary environment for separating grand challenge questions into smaller, manageable subproblems that can be examined individually.

"Computational thinking allows us find a solution to each subproblem using simple methods - some of which you may already know or have seen before - and then put it all together for an overall solution that provides new insights," Ram says. "It's all about seeing patterns of similarity and, over time, learning to automatically apply these patterns to solve problems."

The collaboration and social networking aspects of the iPlant portal will allow scientists with like interests to team up, solve subproblems, and share findings.

"It's match.com for scientists - each new finding or discovery will be visible to the online community of researchers," Ram says. "The more findings you share, the more discoveries you can make."

The Web portal's open-source development philosophy will allow "the user community to take ownership of the project," Ram says. "We are going to produce software products in response to the community's needs, then document how they evolve over time and how they work in the real world."

Researchers hope iPlant's capabilities will evolve to include Google Earth-like qualities. For instance, a researcher might zoom in to analyze the oxygen produced by individual plants, then zoom out to analyze how large-scale changes in the number of those plants present in an ecosystem could affect air quality or climate change.

Ram says business executives familiar with the project are interested in the innovations it will inspire for the private sector. "What we're proposing is a completely new paradigm for collaborative research among a diverse community," Ram says. "It also offers a whole new business model for how companies should approach the development of information technology solutions."

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