CC* Compute: RAPTOR - Reconfigurable Advanced Platform for Transdisciplinary Open Research

Building resilient, sustainable, livable, and environmentally safe dynamic systems (natural or human built) requires on-demand computing resources, facilitating machine learning, data processing, and data analytics. These systems rely on computation to support simulation, modeling, and analyses to enable discovery, facilitate understanding, and make decisions.

This project implements RAPTOR (Reconfigurable Advanced Platform for Transdisciplinary Open Research), a reconfigurable compute environment to address dynamic and diverse computing needs of science drivers––coastal resilience, sustainable environmental research, and systems biology.

The goal of RAPTOR is to increase research production by enhancing computing capabilities at Florida International University (FIU), both at the campus level and through participation in a resource-sharing federated distributed computing community. For that, RAPTOR integrates with the Chameleon Cloud Infrastructure for on-demand resource allocation and the Open Science Grid (OSG) for opportunistic preemptible resource sharing allocation.

The result is a platform capable of connecting with a rapidly deployable sampling system that can assimilate and transmit data in real-time to facilitate actionable intelligence and drive adaptive environmental monitoring decisions, and respond as conditions change. The integration of knowledge, tools, and modes of computation proposed by RAPTOR builds upon the expertise of domain researchers, computer scientists, and IT practitioners towards a “smart cyberinfrastructure” to foster and develop transdisciplinary approaches.

RAPTOR not only introduces new computing modalities at FIU to support its researchers, but also benefits a broader federated community of researchers and scholars sharing resources through OSG and Chameleon Cloud.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.