National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI)
The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) was established to ensure the appropriate acquisition, development and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services that are required for advanced science and engineering research and education. The resources supported by OCI include supercomputers, mass-storage systems, system software, specialized programming environments, scalable interactive visualization tools, specialized software libraries and tools, large-scale data repositories, scientific data management systems, networks, and interface software. OCI also supports educational and support programs related to these areas and scientific and engineering experts who manage and operate these resources.
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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Many advanced Internet initiatives develop under the auspices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a collaboration of networking technologists, which has been the guiding force shaping Internet policy, standards, design and development since the early days of the Internet. The IETF provides for a process under which technical reports and documentation on proposals for revision of protocols are published, for example, as Requests for Comment (RFCs, which can provide information on proposed experiments, proposal, drafts, and standards) and Internet Engineering Notes (IEN). iCAIR has participated in multiple IETF standard development processes. The related Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) undertakes the studies of key topics with a long tem perspective. The current director of the IETF was resident at iCAIR when it was first established. (www.ietf.org)
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Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) also provides for standards related to advanced networking, although primarily for specialized areas such as certain types of physical infrastructure. The IEEE is an international professional society that undertakes a variety of projects leading to the design, development and testing of many different types of advanced components. (www.ieee.org)
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Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF)
CAIR is a founding member of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), which is an international organization that is developing and promoting new methods and concepts related to lightpath (lambda) networking. This organization was established as a collaborative initiative among worldwide National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), consortia, corporations, and other institutions. Many of these entities operate facilities that support communication services based on flexible lightpath provisioning. The GLIF participants provide lightpaths internationally to support multiple research and development activities directed at creating new international communication services. As a global integrated facility, the GLIF supports data-intensive scientific research, optical middleware development, new types of management methods, and many testbed projects. iCAIR is participating with other members of the GLIF in the design and development of international facilities that support new services based on lightpaths, including autonomous peerings. This type of facility is a Global Open Lambda Exchange (GOLE). A prototype of such an exchange has been implemented at the StarLight facility. (www.glif.is)
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Global Grid Forum (GGF)
In the book, The GRID, Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Edited by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, a new vision for advanced computing infrastructure was proposed. These concepts are still be advanced through the Global Grid Forum (GGF). Many computing communities world-wide, including iCAIR researchers, have implemented Grid infrastructure based on the concepts and architecture set forth in that book and in related publications. This new approach to computing infrastructure has fundamentally changed the core concepts of computing and communications. One motivation for this design was to allow national and regional Grids to have significantly more computational power to be available to multiple communities through distributed processing on a shared infrastructure. However, Grids are now used for many different types of applications and services, including those that are not computationally intensive. A major advantage of the Grid design is that it allows multiple types of resources to be discovered and integrated into a single integrated environment using shared infrastructure. iCAIR has worked closely with the GGF, especially with its High Performance Networking Research Group and has contributed to its networking standards development processes. (www.ggf.org)
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Open Science Grid (OSG)
The Open Science Grid (OSG) was established to provide an international Grid computing infrastructure devoted to supporting scientific computing through an open partnership of science researchers and providers of resources, including software development, computing, storage and networks. The OSG Consortium creates and management of the OSG, bringing resources and researchers from universities and national laboratories together and cooperating with other national and international infrastructures to give scientists from many disciplines access to shared resources worldwide. (www.opensciencegrid.org)
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