UC San Diego Library

This report provides the rationale and design for a campus‐wide research cyberinfrastructure (RCI) that will meet federal mandates for research data preservation, improve UCSD’s academic competitiveness, and achieve economies‐of‐scale savings through centralization of core infrastructure elements, while at the same time recognizing the diverse and distributed nature of UCSD’s research enterprise.

Informed by a campus survey conducted in 2008, as well as a number of case studies analyzed by the Research Cyberinfrastructure Design Team (RCIDT), our design focuses primarily (but not exclusively) on digital data. Driven by proliferating high throughput instruments, wireless sensor nets, and supercomputer simulations, the amount of digital data at the heart of the modern research enterprise is growing exponentially at UCSD and around the world. Our proposed data‐centric RCI will not only allow us to cope with the data deluge, it will position UCSD to prosper from it, and become an international leader and innovator in this area.