THE EMERGING CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE: OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

Today, technology is ubiquitous, and nowhere more so than within the science and engineering community. Today's scientists and engineers can draw from a rich spectrum of resources -- from increasingly powerful and prevalent university laboratory and departmental clusters, to scientific instruments providing a deluge of valuable data, to high performance resources capable of running large-scale simulations, and more. As the technological tools for the scientist and engineer become more powerful and more ubiquitous, it becomes increasingly important to integrate these tools "end-to-end" to support ever more cooperative, large-scale, and complex scientific endeavors. Cyberinfrastructure is the organized aggregate of technologies that enable us to access and integrate today's information technology resources -- data, computation, communication, visualization, networking, scientific instruments, expertise -- to facilitate science and engineering goals. Cyberinfrastructure captures the culture of science and engineering research and provides the technological foundation for significant discovery, synthesis, and dissemination. In this talk, we focus on both the opportunities and challenges of building and delivering Cyberinfrastructure and the key elements required to make Cyberinfrastructure a reality.