Computer Science and Engineering faculty part of NSF EPSCoR research infrastructure grant
(From the College of Engineering Magazine, Winter 2009)
In September 2008 the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded to a multi-institution, inter-disciplinary group of Nevada faculty and researchers a $15 million grant for the project titled “Nevada Infrastructure for Climate Change Science, Education, and Outreach.” The state of Nevada has additionally committed about $6.7 million to this five-year project whose lead P.I. is Dr. Gayle Dana from the Desert Research Institute. The main goal of the project is to enhance research infrastructure in the state of Nevada for studying the effects of regional climate change on ecosystem resources. The major inter-disciplinary research questions of this funded proposal are: how will climate change affect water resources and linked ecosystem services and human systems; and how will climate change affect disturbance regimes (e.g., wild-land fires, insect outbreaks, severe storms, droughts) and linked systems?
The project has six components (groups), focused respectively on climate modeling, ecological change, water resources, cyberinfrastructure, education, and policy, decision making and outreach. The cyberinfrastructure group consists of six faculty members, five of them from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University: Dr. Sergiu Dascalu (component lead and institution co-P.I.), Dr. Fred Harris (who also represents DRI ), Dr. Yaakov Varol, Dr. Sushil Louis, and Dr. Monica Nicolescu. Also part of this project component is Dr. Shahram Latifi from UNLV . The cyberinfrastructure component is a key constituent of the project, as it connects with and supports all Nevada Climate Change groups.
The total funding for the cyberinfrastructure component is about $2.4 million, of which about $1.9 million will be used by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the College of Engineering. This represents a substantial involvement in the project and a significant presence from the University, whose total project budget is about $4.1 million. The grant will be used by the cyberinfrastructure group to focus on designing and developing a Nevada Climate Change data portal as well as on researching and building software frameworks aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary scientific collaboration via smooth integration of heterogeneous tools and data.
Besides the data portal and the software frameworks other major infrastructure building capabilities for this group include high performance computing resources for climate modeling, advanced data visualization facilities, and new personnel that will be hired, including a database system administrator, a software developer, and several graduate research assistants.