Project Overview

The National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative (PSCIC) program is intended to create a new type of organization – a cyberinfrastructure collaborative for the plant sciences - that enables new conceptual advances through integrative, computational thinking.  To achieve this, the iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) was developed.  iPlant is fluid and dynamic, utilizing new computational science and cyberinfrastructure solutions to address an evolving array of grand challenges in the plant sciences.  It is community-driven, involving plant biologists, computer and information scientists and engineers, and experts from other disciplines, all working in integrated teams on solving plant science grand challenges. The iPlant Collaborative brings together strengths in plant biology, bioinformatics, computational science and high performance computing, as well as innovative approaches to education, outreach, and the study of social networks.

Several key principles guided the development and activities of iPlant. Specifically, iPlant --

• is a cyberinfrastructure collaborative rather than purely a cyberinfrastructure;
• will enable multidisciplinary teams to address grand challenges in plant science;
• will be an entity that is by, for, and of the community;
• will help train the next generation in computational thinking; and
• is designed to be able to reinvent itself as the needs of the community and technologies change.

The driving force behind iPlant is the nature of the grand challenges in the plant sciences, and all facets of the Collaborative are organized around those questions. Selecting these questions is a community-driven effort, and to facilitate that, iPlant hosts workshops focused on a specific area of plant biology, with participants cutting across the spectrum of the computational and biological sciences. The goal of each workshop is to identify the “grand challenge” questions in that field, as well as the necessary tools, strategies, and approaches that will be needed to solve the question(s).

Self-forming Grand Challenge teams from the community are chosen by a community-representative Board of Directors to work with iPlant personnel to develop ‘Discovery Environments’ (DEs). Each DE will be a cyberinfrastructure within which the GC team, and the community, address and solve grand challenge problems and related problems of interest. It is anticipated that DEs designed for different grand challenges will overlap and coalesce into a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure for the whole of the plant sciences. To achieve this coalescence, iPlant is working to simultaneously address 2-4 grand challenges covering a broad range of plant biology, from the molecular, cellular, and developmental to the organismic, ecological, and evolutionary.

The cyberinfrastructure created by iPlant provides the community with two main capabilities:

• access to world-class physical infrastructure – for example, persistent storage and compute power via local and national resources, and
• services that promote interactions, communications, and collaborations and that advance the understanding and use of computational thinking in plant biology.

Through these capabilities, iPlant catalyzes progress in targeted areas of plant biology, and more broadly, advances the whole of plant science through new, creative, synthesis activities, and training the next generation of scientists in computational and collaborative thinking.

The cyberinfrastructure framework consists of:

• a comprehensive combination of hardware (campus cluster and TeraGrid-based resources, primary and secondary data repositories, and advanced visualization facilities)
• software (open source, developed by a distributed team of developers and programmers)
• network fabric (including upgraded access to National Lambda Rail, Internet2, and TeraGrid)
• a multi-disciplinary team of experts leading a large group with expertise in a broad range of plant science, computer networks, workflows, high-performance computing, algorithms, visualization, statistics, data mining, modeling and simulation, and bioinformatics.

Distinct Discovery Environments will consist of community collaboration spaces, novel mathematical and computational approaches, semantic data analysis/discovery tools, an underlying cyberinfrastructure for access, analysis and collaboration, and both feedback processes and social network analyses for studying, evolving, and refining the Discovery Environments. The project is a virtual organization with iPlant staff based at the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), Texas Advanced Computing Center (UT Austin), Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Arizona State University, Purdue University, and the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, as well as many other U.S. and international academic institutions with Grand Challenge team members.

The broader impacts of the iPlant Collaborative will not be limited merely to the solution of currently intractable grand challenge questions, because at its core iPlant is actually a community-building and educational enterprise designed to facilitate education and outreach. Grand Challenge teams and iPlant staff will work together to educate students (K-12, undergraduate, and graduate, including underrepresented groups) through development and use of Discovery Environments. Thus, education and outreach efforts will permeate the iPlant Collaborative and will be coordinated and facilitated by dedicated senior personnel at our partner institutions.

For more information, please contact the iPlant Project Director, Steve Goff.  Click here for our mailing address.