UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

An interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, psychologists, biologists, chemists, and physicists at the University of Oregon (UO) is creating a large-scale computational and storage resource to support next-generation scientific research in these areas. The conceptual design of the Applied Computational Instrument for Scientific Synthesis (ACISS) emphasizes both the productive shared use of the instrument and the potential synergies it will afford for integrative scientific research. The ACISS hardware will consist of general purpose multicore computing nodes, high-performance computing nodes augmented with GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) acceleration, a high-volume storage system, and high-bandwidth networking infrastructure, all to be housed in a new dedicated machine room in the UO science complex. High-end visualization equipment will be incorporated into an existing visualization lab in the Department of Computer and Information Science. A key part of the ACISS infrastructure is the way in which the system will be made available to researchers on campus. The emerging convergence of high-performance computing technologies, virtualization techniques, and sophisticated cluster management software provides a unique opportunity to manage ACISS as a computational science cloud. Groups that use the system will be able to configure their own virtual machine images and carry out research work as if they had their own dedicated cluster. The support staff for ACISS will help groups that currently own their own resources migrate onto the cloud, and help other groups start up new projects using ACISS. The domain scientists who are part of the ACISS consortium all have extensive experience with computational methods and are well-positioned to start using the ACISS cloud infrastructure as soon as it is installed. Research projects include: modeling neural networks in C. elegans to better understand the neural mechanisms responsible for chemotaxis and klinotaxis, and investigation of the evolution of genes involved in development and their role in speciation and phenotypic variation; development of neuroinformatic techniques used in brain imaging and analysis, integrating structural information from functional magnetic resource imaging (fMRI) and other sources with electroencephalography (EEG) data; molecular modeling research, including the definition of new techniques for meso-scale modeling and applying computational methods to understand phase transitions and nitrogen fixation; and astrophysical simulations of turbulent plasma flows that influence the early stages of planet formation. In addition, ACISS computer scientists have extensive research experience that is directly applicable to computational science, including software tools for performance measurement, programming environments and languages for describing and executing complex simulations and scientific workflows, and new algorithms used for multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic inference. The ACISS environment will allow those activities to expand and engage with the domain science efforts, and the project is building on a long history of interdisciplinary research at the University of Oregon, and will leverage capital developments underway, notably the new Lewis Integrative Science Building (scheduled to be completed in 2012). ACISS will allow UO to transition to a new paradigm for computational and data-driven scientific research and practice, one that emphasizes productivity and collaboration. The experience gained in early adoption of the ACISS cloud computing technologies will allow us to more rapidly apply this knowledge to create new scientific workflows, more productive research collaborations, and enhanced multidisciplinary education programs. Farther reaching, ACISS can be seen as a model for translational computational science, in which ACISS-based services function as cyber-incubators where new workflows for scientific research.

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