IU's presence at SC is the product of collaboration by IU's:

Indiana University at SuperComputing 2007

IU's Foundations for Innovation

IU Research Computing Foundations

Indiana University is enabling new types of research, pedagogy, creative activity, and community impact by building one of the world's foremost research computing —and computing research —environment. This environment combines deep human expertise, robust systems and services, and advances in computer science and informatics to address the needs of researchers and their collaborators on the local, national, and international stage. This architecture of people, technologies, applications, and collaborations, based on a strong foundation of institutional commitment, comprises IU's Foundations for Innovation.

Institutional Commitment

Beginning with its ground-breaking strategic plan for information technology initiated in 1997, Indiana University has made it an institutional priority to be a leader in information technology in absolute terms. Key successes include major initiatives in advanced networking, computer science research, and computing in support of the sciences. To realize this vision, Indiana University has developed strategic partnerships with other higher education institutions, the State of Indiana, and commercial collaborators.

Human Expertise

Indiana University is home to a large and diverse group of computing experts who work together to translate institutional commitment into beneficial and innovative research projects, support services, and technological innovations. Essential contributors come from core schools and labs focusing on theoretical and applied computing research, a central IT organization providing robust systems, services, and infrastructure, and a broad range of academic departments applying this research and cyberinfrastructure to the advancement of science, humanities, education, and creative activities.

Systems and Services

Robust and reliable systems and services are the tools that enable computing research experimentation and implementation, and which amplify the talents and visions of local and national researchers. IU's cyberinfrastructure combines world-class supercomputing systems, storage systems, networking, and visualization systems with proven professional training, consultation, and support.

Middleware

Effectively connecting scholars and researchers with computing resources requires flexible, reliable middleware. Indiana University is leading and contributing to a number of key middleware research initiatives involving grid technologies, portals, high performance computing, applied cybersecurity, and collaboration tools. These projects provide a stable, common platform for component reuse, minimize duplication of effort across large collaborative projects, and allow researchers to devote more focus to their research and creative activities.

Applications

Indiana University's academic communities are leveraging the Foundations for Innovation to make important new discoveries, to achieve bold new forms of creative expression, and to dramatically enhance the educational experience of students. Advanced applications in the life sciences, physical sciences, engineering, and the arts are helping to create a new standard of living for the citizens of Indiana and are improving the quality of life across the globe.

Collaborative Communities

The top level of the Foundations represents the collaborative communities that Indiana University is building on the state, national, and international scale through its partnerships with leading universities, national laboratories, funding agencies, and private-sector partners. These multi-institutional collaborations aggregate and leverage the expertise and resources of global communities, increasing the pace and scale of discovery by orders of magnitude over what is possible by any single institution.

Focus on Scalability

One of the major cross-cutting themes of IU's Foundations for Innovation is the focus on the scalability of systems, infrastructures, applications, and support models. Specific methods include: adopting open hardware standards and architectures; contributing to open software and middleware standards; developing portals to effectively grow application-specific HPC communities; and employing IU's leveraged support model and Knowledge Base (kb.iu.edu) to provide support for diverse and distributed communities of users.

Data-Centric Philosophy

Data is a critical asset and artifact of research, requiring a comprehensive response to the challenges of collection, refinement, publishing, archiving, and curation. Indiana University researchers are developing a unified computing approach to the pursuit of distilling new knowledge from the ever-increasing deluge of data. Data-centric computing is a major crosscutting theme of the Foundations for Innovation that will inform all future strategic, information technology initiatives.

Innovation

Indiana University's cyberinfrastructure provides a foundation for innovation by the IU community, the research community of the state of Indiana, and the research community of the United States. Nearly ten years ago, Indiana University set a goal of becoming a leader, in absolute terms, in information technology. Today, IU is widely recognized as having achieved this goal in many areas of information technology, prompting former Intel CEO Andy Grove to say that "If you want to see the future of information technology, check out what is happening at Indiana University" and Newsweek to rank IU's flagship campus as the Hottest Big State School in part for its "embrace of the information age." At the recent dedication of IU's Big Red supercomputer, IU Provost and Vice President for IT Michael McRobbie quoted the famed mathematician David Hilbert who said, "We must know. We will know." Indiana University's cyberinfrastructure sets the Foundations for Innovation that will make it so.