Major projects

Major and collaborative projects

Below are projects that involve a grant award in excess of $5 million or a collaboration of more than one PTI center. (Information about other projects is listed on each center’s web pages.)

NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence

The National Science Foundation designated the Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure (CTSC) as its Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. The Center is led by CACR Director Von Welch and Chief Policy Analyst Craig Jackson.

CTSC leads the NSF community in understanding how cybersecurity promotes trustworthy scientific and engineering research, while also enabling the broad adoption of practices in cyberinfrastructure operations, research, and development.

Centers for Academic Excellence

Indiana University is also designated as a:

  • NSA/DHS National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance/Cyber Defense Education
  • NSA/DHS National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance/Cyber Defense Research

Through CACR and in collaboration with the Luddy School of Informatics and Computing, PTI has coordinated Indiana University’s key cybersecurity designations since 2008.

HathiTrust Research Center

Led at IU by D2I Director Dr. Beth Plale, the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enables nonprofit and educational users to have computational access to published works in the public domain. These works are stored within the HathiTrust Digital Library, an extensive collaborative digital library.

HTRC has developed the HTRC Data Capsule as a secure framework through which researchers and educators can study copyrighted content. They may remove the research results from that data capsule—without violating copyright on the underlying protected literature.

Jetstream

Jetstream is a first-of-a-kind system for the NSF—a distributed production cloud resource. Jetstream offers on-demand academic cloud services, enabling researchers or students to select a pre-existing VM image or to create a new virtual environment for personalized research computing.

Jetstream also hosts persistent science gateways and enables data movement, storage, and dissemination. Jetstream is a managed science cloud—that is, a cloud managed for scientific applications. Jetstream is led by IU with PTI Executive Director Craig Stewart as PI.

MIDAS - CIF21 DIBBs: Middleware and High Performance Analytics Libraries for Scalable Data Science

This project will design and implement software—Middleware for Data-Intensive Analytics and Science (MIDAS). MIDAS will enable scalable applications and combine high performance computing with the rich functionality of the commodity Apache Big Data Stack.

This project will also design and implement a set of cross-cutting, high-performance data analysis libraries. For example, SPIDAL (Scalable Parallel Interoperable Data Analytics Library) will support new programming and execution models for data-intensive analysis in a wide range of science and engineering applications.

This project is led by PI Geoffrey C. Fox, Director of the Digital Science Center.

Virtual, Verification, Validation, & Visualization Institute (V4I)

The  Virtual, Verification, Validation, & Visualization Institute (V4I) is a private-public partnership, and its concept is simple. Private sector members put forth problems for which they need solutions; other private sector members and public sector members work to arrive at solutions to those problems. It’s a very different approach than the typical approach universities take, which is to line up a bunch of solutions, then try to find out where those solutions match a problem someone in the private sector happens to have.

Administered by the the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining (NCDMM), V4I is industry centered, and very much focused on large businesses with a presence in Indiana or in a neighboring state. Some of the work V4I does is related to defense, but it also works in several other business sectors.

The Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University is a member of V4I, and one of three academic institution members so far. PTI leads the “Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Resources” subgroup within V4I, which includes Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame. V4I is starting up a set of five launch projects – all of which will establish the basic tools, technologies, and proofs of concept for V4I to move forward. PTI – particularly the Science Gateway Research Institute – is a co-lead of one of these launch projects, designed to create a secure data repository and processing environment to speed manufacturing design and verification processes.

Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP)

Funded by the Department of Homeland Security, the SWAMP provides a free-to-use software assurance facility for testing weaknesses that can lead to software vulnerabilities and other cybersecurity problems. SWAMP facilities are now available as open source for on-facility installation.

CACR Director Von Welch is a co-PI on the project, and CACR and RT’s High Throughput Computing group will provide leadership for cybersecurity, monitoring, and user support.

Open Gateway Computing Environments Science Gateways Platform as a Service (OGCE SciGaP)

The SciGaP project develops and deploys Apache Airavata software as an open source platform of services that can be used to build Science Gateways.

The SciGaP project (NSF award #1339774) is supported by a collaborative grant. It is led by Indiana University and includes the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center San Antonio as collaborating partners.

Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center Director Marlon Pierce is the PI of this project.

Science Gateway Institute

PTI provides cybersecurity leadership for the Science Gateway Institute through a collaboration between the Cyberinfrastructure Integration Research Center (CIRC) and the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR), specifically Director Von Welch and Senior Systems Analyst Randy Heiland.

XSEDE

XSEDE is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise. People around the world use these resources and services—things like supercomputers, collections of data, and new tools—to improve our planet.

IU has a major subcontract from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with Craig Stewart as the IU  Principal investigator. Dr. Marlon Pierce is a key leader in XSEDE’s extended collaborative support services, with a focus on implementing science gateways. Rich Knepper, Therese Miller, and Craig Stewart are all leaders in XSEDE’s community interoperability efforts to connect campus and national cyberinfrastructure. And Julie Wernert and Craig Stewart are leading XSEDE efforts to quantify its benefits to the US overall.