The National Science Foundation has awarded the Electronic Visualization Laboratory's proposal STCI: OptIPlanet Cyber-Mashup: Persistent Visualization and Collaboration Services for Global Cyber Infrastructure. The $1,933,337 award was made on 08/18/09 for a three year period beginning 9/1/09.

Principal investigator, Jason Leigh with co-PIs - Computer Science associate professor Andrew Johnson, research assistant professor Luc Renambot, and EVL associate director Maxine Brown will direct research efforts focused on the development and enhancement of cyberinfrastructure technology for large-scale data visualization and collaboration in science and engineering.

The goal of this project is to accelerate the growth of a burgeoning community of international institutions that have adopted OptIPortals- ultra-resolution visualization display instruments interconnected by high-speed networks.

OptIPortals have been identified in recent DOE and NSF reports as a crucial cyberinfrastructure technology for facilitating large-scale data visualization and collaboration in science and engineering. This project will develop a collection of new community-requested capabilities for the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)- the fundamental software that drives OptIPortals. Furthermore this project will establish a persistent and expandable collaboration service to facilitate distance collaborations between organizations that have adopted OptIPortals.