Advancing Computational Science, Visualization and Homeland Security Research/ Education at Minority Serving Institutions National Model Promoted/ Implemented by MSI-CIEC (Minority Serving Institutions-CyberInfrastructure Empowerment Coalition)

Many Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) in the United States lack sufficient resources and knowledge to take significant advantage of the national and international computational resources available to advance computational science research and education. National challenges raised for Homeland Security (HS) have focused US government attention on the critical yet untapped human resource potential at MSIs. The US National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid has attempted to define, promote and deliver an integrated set of high performance computing resources to the national academic research community. However, a gap persists in the connections between the TeraGrid program and non-TeraGrid national computational resources and data. For MSIs and other users, these circumstances hinder seamless, natural use of resources from local, campus infrastructure through national high performance computing research tools. In spite of impressive TeraGrid advances, its user community falls short of engaging a much broader potential community especially the MSI community. A campus-based integrated CyberInfrastructure (CI) is essential to bridge this gap.