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 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. 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 guide the development and activities of iPlant. Specifically, iPlant --

• is a cyberinfrastructure collaborative rather than purely a cyberinfrastructure;
• enables multidisciplinary teams to address Grand Challenges in plant science;
• is an entity that is by, for, and of the community;
• helps 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 cyberinfrastructure created by iPlant provides the community with two main capabilities:

• access to world-class physical cyberinfrastructure – 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 XSEDE-based resources, primary and secondary data repositories, and advanced visualization facilities)
• software (open source, developed by a distributed team of developers and programmers)
• support for a multi-disciplinary teams with expertise in a broad range of plant science, high-performance computing, visualization, data mining, modeling and simulation, and bioinformatics.

For more information, please contact the iPlant Project Director, Steve Goff.