Gabriela C. Weaver, chemistry professor. She is working on CASPiE. Part of CASPiE is getting undergrads into research. How do you engage students in research that results in meaningful data, and is interesting to students? Typical undergrad lab equipment is not good enough to get data for publishing. Purdue buys one of each such instrument and equips them with an autosampler and remote access so other institutions can use them. Purdue currently has: Raman Spectrometer, HPLC with diode array detector, gas chormatography, and agas chomatographer/mass spectrometer.
The data go from the instrument to a CITRIX server, then over the internet and is eventually stored.
Only one person can be logged in to the instrument at a time, so as soon as data are collected, the data are dumped and the student is logged off the instrument.
There are two ways to use these instruments: batch mode and individual mode. In batch mode, the instructor runs the data for the students. In individual mode, students run their own data.
For training purposes, all options can be turned off. This will protect the instrument and previously collected data.
David Salt, Horticulture and landscape architecture
Ionomics meaures micro nutrients required for life in a high throughput system. Ionomics can also be used detect toxins.
A recent project was a genome-wide analysis of ionomic gene function in yeast using 12k different strains. It look about a year to gather the data. There are many ways to mine this data. Without CI using the data is impossible.
The evolution of this took about 10 years. It started on Excel, then went to Access. Then it went online with the E enterprise center, and has gotten more sophisticated since then. Currently, the data and the metadata are stored in a relational database.
www.ionomicsHUB.org is where the yeast (and other) data lives.
NSF would not have been as keen to fund research if there was not CI in place.
Matt Potrawski, Purdue Center for Prediction of Reliability
The Center for Prediction of Reliablility is DOE funded, 21.2M for 5 years. There are 35-40 faculty, staff, grad students, and post docs. MEMS (the items they test) are now in laptops and cellphones. There are stringent requirements that the chips must survive:
- billions of cycles
- dynamic impact conditions
- high g, up to 30k g over milliseconds
- -50 C to 800 C
All of these are good for simulations. Much of the simulations deal with uncertainty in inputs and outputs.