Pacific Research Platform: Its Legacy and Promise

A Virtual Symposium

Tuesday, June 22, 2021

9:00am-12:00pm PST

Register here: https://berkeley.zoom.us/webinar/register/tJMsf-GqqTMsGNLjkl8mPrBisNzGxpz4AsUj

Building on years of research in network engineering and data-intensive collaborative science, the Pacific Research Platform was born in 2015 with a grant from the National Science Foundation. It aimed to knit together major university research networks and supercomputing centers on the west coast as a proof of concept for how limitations of space and time could be erased by virtue of tight coordination among large-scale regional networks like CENIC and those responsible for delivering data to end-users in labs and campus offices throughout the Pacific Rim.

Six years and trillions of gigabytes later, the PRP concept has expanded to encompass a National and even Global Research Platform. As important as developments in the cyberinfrastructure and software driving it have been, equally significant are the professional relationships, field-building development for science engagement and research facilitation, and domain-specific discoveries that the PRP facilitated. As the PRP’s initial 6-year run concludes in 2021, this symposium will recap innovations and advancements enabled by the projects’ leaders and partners.

Agenda

• 9:00 AM Welcome: Camille Crittenden, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute
• 9:10 AM Keynote: Larry Smarr, Principal Investigator, Pacific Research Platform
  • Remarks and introduction by Louis Fox, CENIC
• 9:40 AM Panel 1: Stories from the sciences. The PRP has accelerated scientific discovery in a range of disciplines and applications, from the biological and physical sciences to astronomy and high-resolution video. Researchers and faculty will present a selection of projects that have benefited from the infrastructure and capabilities of the PRP and illustrate the importance of advances in networking and computational infrastructure for progress in their fields.
  • Alex Feltus, Clemson University
  • Ilkay Altintas, San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD
  • Dan Wertheimer, SETI (CASPER), UC Berkeley
  • Scott Sellars, U.S. State Dept, formerly of Scripps Institute and NSF
  • Frank Wuerthwein, Open Science Grid, UCSD
    • Moderated by Jeff Weekley, UC Santa Cruz
• 10:30 AM PRP Video, break
• 10:45 AM Panel 2: Stories from technologists, engineers, and research facilitators. The technology of network engineering, methods for distributed computation and storage, and the career paths for professionals in Research IT consulting have also evolved dramatically in the last five years, prompted in part by the community that PRP created and fostered. Leaders in creating the hardware and networks, as well as experts in their deployment and application, will speak to these advances made possible by the PRP.
  • Sana Bellamine, CENIC
  • Richard Alo, Dean, Florida A&M
  • John Graham, UCSD
  • Jim Kyriannis, NYSERNet
    • Moderated by Ann Kovalchick, UC Merced
• 11:30 AM Future directions: What is on the horizon?
  • Tom DeFanti, Qualcomm Institute, UC San Diego
  • Ana Hunsinger, Internet2
    • Moderated by Chris Hoffman, UC Berkeley
• 11:45 AM Closing remarks, Amy Walton, National Science Foundation
• 12:00 PM Adjourn