History

The Project's Foundation

In 2006, the National Science Foundation (NSF) solicited proposals to create "a new type of organization – a cyberinfrastructure collaborative for plant science" with a program titled "Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative" (PSCIC) with Christopher Greer as program director. The details can be read on the NSF website's PSCIC program page: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=13704.

The Beginning Stage

Richard Jorgensen led a team through the proposal stage. They submitted a proposal that was accepted by the NSF and on February 1, 2008 the iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) was created via a cooperative agreement. The details can be read on the NSF website's award abstract page: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0735191.

Initial Leadership

Initial Institutions and Collaborators

This list includes those who were listed on the original proposal as well as people involved in the project kick off.

The project kicked off in a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in April 2008 with a broad invitation to the plant sciences community to propose Grand Challenge workshops, whose purpose was to identify significant biological problems, "Grand Challenges," potentially solvable by use of cyberinfrastructure and software tools.

iPlant hosted five workshops during the fall of 2008 at Biosphere 2, north of Tucson, Arizona, involving approximately 300 plant scientists and computer scientists to suggest problems in the plant sciences that could benefit from cyberinfrastructure. An additional workshop focused just on the cyberinfrastructure itself was held in January 2009. From these community-driven workshops, iPlant's Board of Directors recommended that iPlant develop cyberinfrastructure to address two Grand Challenges: the iPlant Tree of Life, which proposed a technical Grand Challenge of building a phylogenetic tree of more than 500,000 green plant species, and the iPlant Genotype-to-Phenotype project, which proposed cyberinfrastructure needed to elucidate the relationship between plant genotypes and the resultant plant phenotypes in non-constant environments.

Several working groups comprised of plant scientists, computer scientists, and iPlant staff were formed to identify methods to address heretofore unsurmountable hurdles that individual plant researchers faced, such as how to assemble, integrate, store, annotate, and share extremely large databases; how to utilize or link existing software tools to create useful workflows; and how to leverage existing NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure resources to process data faster and more easily.

Transitions

In late 2009, Stephen Goff was named PI and Daniel Stanzione was added as a Co-PI as the initial team members transitioned to other projects and pursuits. Under the new leadership, the process of creating cyberinfrastructure moved from the information gathering stage while service creation began and gained momentum.

In January 2010, iPlant released the inaugural version of its Discovery Environment (DE). The Discovery Environment is a web-based portal that provides plant science researchers with the ability to use community-recommended software tools in a single web-based workspace in a system that can handle terabytes of data while utilizing high performance supercomputing resources as needed to perform these tasks much more quickly. It has an interface designed to hide the complexity needed to do this from the end user. The goal is to make the cyberinfrastructure available to non-technical end users who are not as comfortable using command line tools but also allow more direct access to the cyberinfrastructure by computational biologists.

Today

While continuing development on the Discovery Environment, iPlant has created useful releases of several services such as Atmosphere, DNA Subway, and a set of APIs to allow others to create their own interfaces to iPlant's cyberinfrastructure. It has grown from an idea shared by researchers at a small number of institutions. iPlant now has a concrete, working implementation of many of its foundational ideas, a plan for expanding the abilities of the cyberinfrastructure, and a growing list of institutions with which it works.

As envisioned by NSF, the cyberinfrastructure iPlant is building is designed to be community-driven, meaning the plant sciences community determines the priority features and functions; and extensible, meaning that the cyberinfrastructure's architecture and open-source coding allows the community itself to modify or build upon the foundation that iPlant has created.

More information is available about current services available at: Getting Started with iPlant.

Current Leadership

Collaborating Institutions

Collaboration with people at the institutions listed includes work on specific projects, tool development, extension of the cyberinfrastructure, and more.