ACTI Campus Cyberinfrastructure (ACTI-CCI) Working Group

ACTI-CCI Mission Statement

Cyberinfrastructure is a rapidly growing and expanding component of information technology focused on distributed computing, data, and communications technology. Hardware and software systems are rapidly being developed and implemented to build the virtual research communities along with the collaborative tools to knit these user communities together. Along with these rapid advances, a well educated and trained workforce needs to be in place to support these activities.

This overall process is changing whole disciplines, educational initiatives, and research methodologies. Cyberinfrastructure is being applied to such areas as supercomputing, large-scale data repositories, digitized scientific data management/high-capacity mass-storage systems, and scalable interactive visualization. State-of-the-art high performance networks deliver connectivity to an array of distributed software tools and services, including grids and middleware that hide the complexities and inhomogeneous components of large heterogeneous systems while seeking to provide users with ubiquitous access and enhanced usability. These activities are now a nationally important set of IT initiatives focused on these new types of opportunities with an emphasis on the education and workforce development to advance these technologies.

The mission of the ACTI Campus Cyberinfrastructure (ACTI-CCI) Working Group is to help educational institutions develop institutional strategies and plan their resource deployment in this emerging and evolving technological landscape and to help their users harness and optimize the power and capabilities of these new integrated IT tools and systems for educational and research applications in higher education. These activities may include sponsorship of workshops, conferences, white papers and documents on these topics, and interactions and close cooperation with federal funding agencies and other sponsors to assure that grants for research and educational activities target the key components and essential cyber infrastructure tools, methods and technologies.