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Where did the IIC come from?
The Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) was proposed by a group of scientists from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Medical School at Harvard in response to the solicitation for ideas made by the Task Force on Science and Technology, chaired by Provost Steve Hyman, in 2004. A whitepaper was prepared, and in 2005 the Initiative was selected to go forward. The IIC’s offices opened in spring 2006, and its first projects were selected that summer.
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What does the IIC do?
The IIC enables science that would not be possible today without the innovative use of computational technology. The IIC takes a project-focused approach, addressing problems that are insoluble in the near term without direct collaboration between researchers in computation and researchers in domain science disciplines. IIC projects address challenges raised by the need to handle and understand data sets that are literally billions of times larger than scientists are used to now, and by the need to run computer simulations of processes as complex as blood flow in the human body or the formation and evolution of structure in the Universe.
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Why a Harvard-wide Initiative?
Many of the challenges faced by the scientists participating in IIC projects are nearly identical between fields. For example, the IIC’s Astronomical Medicine collaboration involves researchers from both the extensive medical imaging community associated with Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, working together to create new solutions for viewing, analyzing, and sharing large three-dimensional images, whether CT scans, MRIs, or maps of star-forming regions or the infant Universe. The team’s results are being shared in scientific journals, and the software produced is made freely available by the IIC. The software will be used by the worldwide medical imaging and astronomical imaging communities as well as by researchers in other related fields, such as geology and geo-spatial demography.
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Is the IIC a supercomputer center for Harvard?
No, not in the traditional sense. The IIC is much more a “super computer-people center,” a center of expertise in solving very difficult computing problems related to, and important for, science. It fosters a culture of collaboration between scientists and computer scientists and provides a place where that kind of collaboration can be carried out. High-performance computing is just one of many fields of computational science. Other general computing research areas relevant to the IIC mission include scientific visualization and computer graphics, simulations/algorithms, database and data provenance research, distributed computing, instrumentation, and education. A good way to think about the joint use of these technologies in everyday life is to think about their application in the making of a modern computer-animated film: novel instrumentation to allow animators to “control” characters; visualization and simulation strategies to, for example, make water look transparent; clever database, provenance, and distributed computing schemes to allow the 400 people working on a movie together to find, edit, and re-create bits of the finished product; advances in computer graphics, distributed computing, and HPC needed to make rendering the finished film feasible on Hollywood time scales; the education of many interns and apprentices along the way—and maybe even educational subject matter!
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How unique is the IIC? Are there competitors?
Answer:At the moment, Harvard is in the lead in establishing a University-sponsored center to foster creative computational research. Other universities have centers focused on supercomputing or scientific visualization or other specific computational technologies. The aspects of the IIC that combine to make it unique at this point are: 1) an institutional commitment of long-term, internal, hard-money funding; and 2) a focus on advancing science.
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How does “Web 2.0” affect the IIC and science in general?
The near-term future of the web is about group collaboration. Commonly used sites such as Google, YouTube, MySpace, SETI@Home, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and Flickr all allow large groups to share either content, computing resources, or both. Some of these commercially deployed “distributed computing” and “distributed resource” technologies are applicable in scientific collaborations with no or very little modification. Other technologies are hard to scale up to the complexity level needed for many scientific problems, and so developing Web 2.0-like technologies for use specifically in very high-data-rate environments is within the IIC’s research agenda.
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How is the IIC related to other new science initiatives at Harvard?
The Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI), Harvard Initiative in Biologically-Inspired Engineering (HIBIE), Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), and the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard are all either already collaborating on IIC projects or plan to do so in the near future.
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What is the educational mission of the IIC?
Computation has become a “third branch” of science alongside theory and experiment. Most universities, including Harvard, have acknowledged this in their research agenda but not within their educational programs. The IIC will address the shortfall by hiring new faculty, by bringing faculty from many disciplines together to strengthen computational education for young scientists, and by offering new research experiences for students and post-doctoral fellows. In addition, the IIC plans to showcase the science facilitated by its projects in new public display spaces and work with educators to enhance K-12 education and public understanding of computational science.
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How big is the IIC, where is the IIC located, and where will it be in the future?
Currently, the IIC is located at 60 Oxford Street, in Cambridge, with additional offices at 14 Story Street. In 2008 the number of employees should approach 30; this number will ultimately grow to between 80 and 100. The IIC is not anticipated to expand beyond ~100 staff in order to keep it from losing focus or taking on too many long-term projects.
