The Science Gateways Research Center Is Now the Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center
The Science Gateways Research Center has a new name. Now known as the Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center (CIRC), the name better reflects its new and broader mission to broaden and enhance the use of advanced cyberinfrastructure, including large supercomputers, grids of smaller computers, and advanced data sources.
CIRC’s core mission is to accelerate research, discovery and collaboration through the creation, integration and operation of user-centric cyberinfrastructure that benefits scientific communities. This includes science gateways, which are designed to help entire communities of researchers use high-performance computing resources and advanced cyberinfrastructures to pursue common scientific goals. CIRC has developed science gateways under the NSF-funded Science Gateways Platform as a service (SciGaP) project. The CIRC team participates in the Science Gateways Community Institute and the XSEDE Science Gateways program, both NSF-funded projects that work with scientific collaborators to develop gateways for their communities, which CIRC bases on its SciGaP platform.
Science gateways are only a part of the research cyberinfrastructure stack. Campus bridging is another key element. This includes the bridging of campuses to larger-scale research ecosystems like XSEDE, and it also includes bridging within campuses, between centrally managed research computing facilities and the scientists, engineers, and scholars who need to use them. CIRC participates in XSEDE’s Cyberinfrastructure Resource Integration group, which helps campus research computing providers set up new computing resources, integrate them into the national ecosystem, and understand how to reach research and scholarly communities on their campuses.
CIRC is also concerned with what happens to the results of computational science and data analysis after a science gateway or campus computing resources are used. CIRC, in collaboration with the Pervasive Technology Institute’s Data to Insight Center, is working with the Research Data Alliance to develop digital object architecture implementations that help make scientific data easier to find and more accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).
CIRC’s expanded portfolio of services, founded on core open-source software for science gateways, expertise in computing systems, and expertise in FAIR data, gives it a full stack of capabilities to support research organizations at Indiana University and beyond.
