CINET: Cyber-Infrastructure for Network Science
The CINET project is developing a cyberinfrastructure middleware to support Network Science. The National Research Council defines Network Science as "the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena." This middleware will give Network Scientists access to an unparalleled computational and analytic environment for research, education and training.
By harnessing new cloud-based resources in an easily accessible manner, this project will enable Network Science researchers to tackle larger, more complex problems. The project vision is to provide researchers, analysts and educators interested in Network Science with an easy-to-use cyber-environment that is accessible from their desktop and integrates into their daily work.
A key goal is to greatly expand the size of networks that are routinely studied from hundreds or thousands of nodes to hundreds of millions of nodes. It will leverage the technology, data and experience of a multi-institutional team.
The cyberinfrastructure is designed to be self-sustainable. It will be pervasive, flexible and extensible. Users can also contribute new networks, data, methods, hardware, and research results in an integrative way. More advanced users can expand the cyberinfrastructure itself by adding new tools, user interfaces, recommendation engines, digital library features, or other desired functionality. By utilizing Service Oriented Architectures and cloud computing, CINET will be self-manageable. End users will be insulated from the complexities of resource allocation, scheduling, cross-platform interactions, and other low-level concerns.
