Bio: Robert Gardner is a Senior Scientist at the Computation Institute from the University of Chicago,  and aSenior Scientist in the Enrico Fermi Institute. He spent his early academic career doing experimental high-energy physics research at different universities in the Midwest. He has been a member of the ATLAS experiment using the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN Laboratory, Geneva, Switzerland since 1998. His experimental work led him to specialize in developing and improving distributed computing technologies necessary for discoveries at the frontier of particle physics. He was instrumental in developing early research computing grids in the U.S.: the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL), and the first deployment of the Open Science Grid (OSG) (NSF, Department of Energy). He have also generated systems for metrics collection for distributed systems (Grid Telemetry, PI, NSF-ITR). Currently, he directs the ATLAS Midwest Tier2 Center, which is comprised of integrated computing facilities from the University of Chicago, Indiana University, and the University of Illinois.

Leadership cyberinfrastructure for science and the humanities

In the past two decades high energy physics transformed its computing model from one relying on a single high performance computing center at the host laboratory to one incorporating resources distributed across institutional boundaries and geographic regions. Given the complexity of detectors and scale of data, the international collaborations of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN demanded it. By removing barriers to resource sharing, the resulting data and computation platform democratized the physics process across collaborations. Accelerated modes of scientific discovery by thousands of physicists were forged using hundreds of data centers linked by very high bandwidth networks. Meanwhile the explosion of commercial, social and enterprise data has driven innovation in resource abstraction and the creation of new service platforms, offering fresh opportunities to accelerate science and intellectual inquiry at all scales and across all domains. In this talk I’ll discuss the strategic significance that cyberinfrastructure technology plays in this regard and describe models for creating ubiquitous “substrates” that remove obstacles to connecting campuses, facilities, instruments and researchers.

This seminar is co-sponsored by the U-M department of Physics