The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $1 million in two grants to the University of Missouri to install a supercomputer enabling data-intensive research and education at MU in fields such as bioinformatics, geoinformatics, high performance computing and engineering applications.
The grants also will fund the position of a cyberinfrastructure (CI) engineer at MU.
Together, the equipment and expert personnel will lead a network of data analysis capabilities at MU that will be shared with other campuses within the University of Missouri System.
It is expected that the initiative will create a secure cloud network that can seamlessly connect local and remote users as well as public cloud infrastructures to meet the data-intensive research needs of its users. Chi-Ren Shyu, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering and director of the Informatics Institute at MU, and his team have collaborated with several MU researchers who are conducting studies, including round-the-clock health monitoring, plant science and genomics, photo-driven and graphics-intensive research, and other data-intensive studies that will use the state-of-the-art technologies.
The new cyberinfrastructure (CI) engineer will collaborate with researchers to develop new tools and provide the expertise needed to quickly adapt the network, analyze it for efficiency and ensure that scientists are receiving proper insights from their data. According to Prasad Calyam, assistant professor of Computer Science and leader of the CI Engineer project at MU, the CI engineer project will investigate the roles, computer resources and policies needed to enable hybrid cloud research collaborations at MU.
Shyu predicts that the equipment and new CI expertise also will provide a cost savings for future research projects as MU scientists will be able to determine the most cost-efficient cloud setting without outsourcing their computing needs. Using currently funded research projects at Mizzou will help perform real-time analyses that will provide valuable information to researchers and educators planning future projects and curriculum design at MU and other institutions in the UM System and state of Missouri.
The research and education initiative highlights the support of the development of the Data Science and Analytics MS degree program from Mizzou Advantage, an initiative that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration among faculty, staff, students and external partners to solve real-world problems in four areas of strength identified at the University of Missouri. These areas include Food for the Future, Sustainable Energy, Media for the Future and One Health/One Medicine.
