Workshop | Monday, March 20, 2017 | 3 PM – 5 PM | Pacifica B, Estancia La Jolla Hotel, San Diego, CA
CENIC Registration: http://bit.ly/2k81Zp5 (If you plan to ONLY attend the PRP Workshop at the 2017 CENIC Conference and do not wish to register for the entire conference, please contact Dr. Brandie Nonnecke <nonnecke@citris-uc.org>)
Presenters:
Michael Cianfrocco, Postdoctoral Fellow, UC San Diego
Elizabeth Villa, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UC San Diego
Frank Vernon, Research Geophysicist & Lecturer, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Camille Crittenden, Deputy Director, Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute, UC Berkeley (moderator)
The NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP) is a science-driven high-capacity data-centric “freeway system” being developed on a large regional scale. The PRP will enable participating universities and other research institutions to move data 1,000 times faster compared to speeds on today’s inter-campus shared Internet. This workshop will highlight early progress on facilitating collaborative, data-intensive research with case studies on use of the PRP for Cryo-EM and real-time wildfire detection and response.
Big data has arrived for a fast-growing field of biological research: cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). As a research tool for ‘structural biology’, researchers worldwide are turning to cryo-EM to illuminate the atomic details that underlie key biological processes. These atomic structures are then used to understand the inner workings of a cell, with implications ranging from human health & disease to agriculture. Cryo-EM relies on collecting and analyzing terabytes of low signal-to-noise ratio images of specimens. Through the analysis of millions of different images, researchers are able to overcome the low signal to produce atomic-level understanding of biological processes through the use of high-performance computing (HPC) resources. Given the large size of the datasets, researchers face significant hurdles connecting HPC resources to their cryo-EM datasets. Furthermore, it is becoming routine to have centralized cryo-EM facilities that serve both local and national users from across the United States.
The High-Performance and Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) was created in 2000 with funding from NSF.and provides telecommunications capability in areas not well-served by other fixed or mobile high-speed wireless services. HPWREN functions as a collaborative cyberinfrastructure on research, education, and public safety activities. This includes creating and evaluating a non-commercial, high-performance, wide-area wireless network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties. Both the County of San Diego and San Diego Gas & Electric provided further resources to acquire additional cameras and weather stations for environmental observations for the HPWREN sensor network, increasing its utility for public safety uses. The cameras were installed in strategic locations on remote mountain tops, overlooking vast areas of mountainous brush and chaparral, and are often used by firefighters to confirm the location or status of an active wildfire, as well as by news organizations and the general public. HPWREN Director Frank Vernon will discuss recent collaborations between the network, CENIC, and the PRP.