Guest post by Karlis Kaugars, Chief Information Officer, University of Rhode Island
The CAREERS (Cyberteam to Advance Research and Education in Eastern Regional Schools) Cyberteam Program is a 3-year initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to build a regional pool of Research Computing Facilitators (RCF) to support researchers at small and midsized institutions in Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
RCFs are experts at figuring out how to match the right compute resources to the task at hand, something that can stymie researchers who are, for example, sifting through billions of records to find a specific pattern of genes that correlates with a particular form of cancer; or examining massive quantities of sensor data to understand movements of the sea floor; or modeling complex molecular structures. When computing needs exceed the capacity of the researcher’s desktop, the RCF’s job is to help make use of local, regional, and national high-performance computing resources to meet the researcher’s needs.
RCFs can often be found in abundance in the research computing groups at companies and large universities, but they are scarce at smaller institutions. Recognizing that promising research can be stopped in its tracks without high performance computing when the need arises, the CAREERS Cyberteam Program was created to fill the gap. Through an experiential training program where participants work with a mentor and join the project team of a scientist working on a computationally intensive project, we hope to help researchers move their projects forward while giving student facilitators a real world experience in research computing facilitation. Student facilitators will be matched with a project and work with a mentor to facilitate research computing needs for a 3-6 month period.
Principal Investigators (PI) of two of the CZ Thematic Clusters are located in the Northeast. Dr. Jeffrey Munroe at Middlebury College in Vermont is leading a team focused on dust in the CZ from the Great Basin to the Rocky Mountains. Dr. Julia Perdrial at the University of Vermont is leading a Thematic Cluster that will be using big data to assess ecohydrological resilience across scales in the CZ. Several co-PIs for the other seven Thematic Clusters are located at Northeast institutions in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania. We invite your participation as we move forward.
If you are interested in participating in this program, please create an account on the Careers Cyberteam portal to submit a project for consideration.