While hardware performance has been growing exponentially – with gate density doubling every 18 months, storage capacity every 12 months, and network capability every 9 months – it has become clear that increasingly capable hardware is not the only requirement for computationenabled discovery. Sophisticated software, visualization tools, middleware and scientific applications created and used by interdisciplinary teams are critical to turning flops, bytes and bits into scientific breakthroughs. It is the combined power of these capabilities that is necessary to advance the frontiers of science and engineering, to make seemingly intractable problems solvable and to pose profound new scientific questions. The comprehensive infrastructure needed to capitalize on dramatic advances in information technology has been termed cyberinfrastructure. Cyberinfrastructure integrates hardware for computing, data and networks, digitally-enabled sensors, observatories and experimental facilities, and an interoperable suite of software and middleware services and tools. Investments in interdisciplinary teams and cyberinfrastructure professionals with expertise in algorithm development, system operations, and applications development are also essential to exploit the full power of cyberinfrastructure to create, disseminate, and preserve scientific data, information, and knowledge....NSF envisions a world in which digital science and engineering data are routinely deposited in convenient repositories, can be readily discovered in well-documented form by specialists and non-specialists alike, are openly accessible, and are reliably preserved.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/01/2005 01:31:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
