Craig Stewart

Title: Hybrid clouds, science gateways, and distributed workflows for big data (and other data too)

Track: Analytics

Dr. Craig Stewart leads the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), IU’s flagship initiative for advanced IT research, development, and delivery in support of research, scholarship, and artistic performances. He is particularly involved in leading cyberinfrastructure services affiliated with PTI, and its activities in economic development, training, education, and outreach.

Stewart has extensive experience leading and managing services to support IU researchers – including past appointments as Associate Dean for Research Technologies, and Director of the Stat/Math Center, Research and Academic Computing, and Indiana Genomics Initiative Information Technology Core; and as special assistant for the Life Sciences, IU Office of the Vice President for Research. He is also an adjunct professor in informatics, medical genetics, and biology, and has been a visiting faculty member in Computer Science, University of Stuttgart and a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Technische Universitaet Dresden (Germany).

Stewart holds a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Indiana University, and a BA in mathematics and biology from Wittenberg University.

Abstract: Everyone recognizes the importance of cloud technology in making computing power – particularly in the area of analytics – more easily accessible for a wide variety of purposes and to a wide variety of user communities. In this talk, leaders of the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute will discuss IU’s activities in cloud technologies and science gateways, with implications for academic as well as private sector uses. The IU Pervasive Technology Institute (pti.iu.edu) is the lead institution in deploying the Jetstream cloud system. Jetstream is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded cloud for conducting science and engineering research as well as an easy-to-use platform for education activities. Jetstream eases access to analytics applications via an intuitive user interface and a library of publicly available Virtual Machines. Sometimes it takes even more than that to make an application really accessible – which is where science gateways come in. Science Gateways are web portals that provide secure and “guided” access to high performance and analytics applications. In this talk we will discuss how clouds and science gateways relate, and how the IU Pervasive Technology Institute is aiding the Virtual Validation, Verification, and Visualization Institute (v4I.us) in accelerating economically important analytics and analyses.