CANARIE targeting academics with new cyberinfrastructure program

CANARIE is investing $15 million in academic cyberinfrastructure (CI) through its Network Enabled platforms (NEP) program. NEP is designed to accelerate the development and implementation of sustained research platforms by assisting research institutions involved in distributed research projects to adopt the tools, architectures and interfaces required for collaboration.

Building on CANARIE's Intelligent Infrastructure Program, the NEP program will provide between $500,000 and $3 million per successful project, supporting up to 100% of eligible project costs. The deadline for applications is November 15.

Firms like Nortel Networks, IBM, Lucent and Alcatel are all active developing CI technologies. CANARIE hopes the NEP program will encourage academic institutions and government laboratories to adopt CI tools to participate in large national and international projects.

"The hope is that, through the NEP, we can bring Canadian industry to help out academia in adapting to these new technologies for the next generation of science," says Bill St Arnaud, CANARIE's chief research officer. "There's a huge need, not just for the toolsets themselves but to educate the researchers on the capabilities and benefits of these tools. Academia in Canada is way behind the rest of the world in the deployment and use of these technologies."

Projects in which network-enabled platforms play are role include the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the Atlas Project, Project Neptune, the Canadian Light Source and several genomics and proteomics platforms supported by Genome Canada. Several of the early projects established under the Canada-California Strategic Innovation Partnership are also CI in nature.

CANARIE has also allotted $15 million to continue its CANARIE Connections Program (now called Infrastructure Extension Program) to bolster existing research and education networks by focusing on connections between government laboratories, institutions and other facilities.

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