With Alliance, Oregon Universities Aim to Enable Innovation

Oregon universities are working together to position themselves and partners as a center for developing the cyber infrastructure to support high-level research computing and new technologies in AI and other areas.

The University of Oregon is taking the lead on a new initiative known as the Cyberinfrastructure Alliance for Oregon (CIAO), a collaboration that will include seven other public universities, as well as Link Oregon, a nonprofit providing high-speed broadband to other state nonprofits and public-sector members. The project is funded, in part, by a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

A first step will be developing a cyber infrastructure plan and needs assessment to best understand “the cyberinfrastructure needs for each university including requirements for large centers and collaborations, technology-enhanced curriculum, pinpoint current bottlenecks impeding progress, and map needs to national resources,” Christy Long, associate CIO for technology infrastructure at the University of Oregon, said in an email.

“We seek to engage students, researchers, assistant professors, teaching faculty, and department heads and deans at each university,” she said.

Other Oregon universities involved in CIAO include Oregon State University (OSU), Oregon Health and Science University, Portland State University (PSU), Oregon Institute of Technology, Eastern Oregon University, Southern Oregon University, and Western Oregon University.

Initiatives like this one aim to decentralize cutting-edge research computing out of a single university, often a flagship campus like the University of Oregon. Rather, the approach is to grow the tech capabilities among all of the state’s universities, as a means of advancing Oregon as a center for the development of research in innovation and the growth of technology jobs.

This goal is aided by adjacent projects like the Oregon Regional Computing Accelerator (Orca), which was also awarded a $1 million NSF grant last year. Orca operates a free-to-access network of high-capacity computers connected and equipped with graphics processing units (GPU) components capable of AI tasks like machine learning. Orca is Oregon’s first statewide, regional cyber infrastructure cluster, and is made possible, in part, by funding from OSU alumni Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, and his wife Lori Huang.

“It is very important that smaller and under-resourced institutions have access to high-performance hardware like this GPU cluster,” Will Pazner, an assistant professor in PSU’s Fariborz Maseeh Department of Mathematics and Statistics, said via email. “GPUs are critical for artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational science, and data science. Their cost can be prohibitive for smaller institutions or educators or researchers who don’t have access to a lot of research funding. That’s why Orca is designed to provide free-of-cost access across the region.”

The development of a 400-gigabit network connecting campuses is another piece of essential cyber infrastructure to enable next-gen computing and research.

A 400-gig network “enables the growing demands for AI and the associated data that will be part of that process,” Mark Keever, OSU’s executive director for advanced research computing services, said during a panel at the annual Link Oregon member meeting in June.

“AI is democratizing research computing across the campus. It’s not just engineering and science. You now have liberal arts that has large data sets,” he said.

This level of connectivity is not just coming to one area or one building on campus, serving a single supercomputer.

“We’re actually in the process now of upgrading our entire backbone to 400 gigs,” Keever said. “We’re also looking to build out a separate 400-gig network on campus that would connect four of our big research buildings.”

This level of high-speed networking “really is a strategic enabler for research, education and innovation across our state,” Long said during the panel, noting the increasingly collaborative nature of today’s scientific research, aggregating data distributed across geographic areas.

Data is often passed through digital platforms for preprocessing, cleaning and formatting. It’s then transferred to high-performance computing clusters, supercomputers or the cloud, where it undergoes advanced analysis for AI modeling and machine learning, she said.

“In order to support this end-to-end journey, a 400-gig network backbone does ensure the data movement across the entire pipeline, from edge to core,” she said.

Some of the potential use cases for a 400-gig network could include the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Oregon State University, where some 900 sensors collects and stream more than seven terabytes of oceanographic data every month. There’s the Digital City Testbed Center at PSU, which generates about 10 terabytes of smart city data a month. And the University of Oregon’s Oregon Hazards Lab produces large volumes of data from wildfire research and monitoring networks.

Efforts like CIAO will focus all of these resources and projects into a statewide strategy for continuing to make Oregon a center for innovation and cyber research across multiple areas of study, and perhaps most notably — multiple campuses. As demand for a highly skilled tech workforce accelerates rapidly, these skilled workers can team with researchers and educators to enable use of cutting-edge computational tools and resources in the classroom and research laboratory, Long said.

“CIAO will expand membership of the statewide research computing group Community of Practice (CoP) to include members from all eight public institutions in Oregon,” Long said. CoP members will participate in a forum for sharing campus updates, and focused discussions on topics of interest including identity and access management, data management, and security and compliance.

“By aligning Oregon’s cyberinfrastructure with emerging national standards and accelerating access to advanced technologies, this effort is expected to stimulate statewide economic growth by attracting research funding, supporting innovation-driven industries, and building a skilled technical workforce,” Long said.