Infrastructure for eScience and eLearning in Higher Education

Lazowska, E., Lee, P., Elliott, C., & Smarr, L. Infrastructure for eScience and eLearning in Higher Education. 12/12/2008. Computing Community Consortium.

Abstract

Recent rapid advances in information and communication technologies – both hardware and
software – are creating a new revolution in discovery and learning, laying the foundation for a
more competitive US economy in the second decade of the 21st century.
Over the past several decades, computational science – the large-scale simulation of phenomena
– has joined theory and experiment as a fundamental tool in many branches of science and
engineering. Today we are at the dawn of a second revolution in discovery – a revolution that
will have far more pervasive impact. The focus of this new approach to science – called
eScience – is data; specifically:

• the ability to manage orders of magnitude more data than ever before possible;
• the ability to provide this data directly and immediately to a global community;
• the ability to use algorithmic approaches to extract meaning from huge volumes of data.