The University of Washington and UCSD will share a joint $3.9 million grant to link observatories off the West Coast to research institutions on land, the National Science Foundation announced.
The grant is the largest of 120 awards from the Foundation’s Information Technology Research program in 2004, according to a statement from the independent government agency.
UCSD’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Washington will use the grant money to build the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid.
The new technologies that will be developed with the grant will allow institutions to collect data from existing ocean observatories, according to Doug Ramsey, a spokesman for CAL (IT)2 and Jacobs School of Engineering.
“This will give research institutions simultaneous information coming from sensors by creating a network up and down the West Coast [to send the information] over the Internet,” Ramsey said.
According to Ramsey, most of the work to be done on the UCSD campus has to do with the part of the network located on land, which will be high-speed and allow researchers to use the data.
CAL (IT)2, led by director Larry Smarr, will be involved with “hard technology,” such as the networking of the research institutions, while SIO will be more highly involved with the “application side,” Ramsey said.
The NSF eliminated the award’s “large,” “medium” and “small” class sizes used in past years and has instead awarded midrange grants because of limited Information Technology Research funds this year, the agency’s Web site said. It gave away most of the approximately $1 billion dollars appropriated for the five-year project during its first four years, leaving little for 2004.
It imposed the new rules after two years in which UCSD received the agency’s largest grants. In 2002, the campus was awarded $12.5 million. The year after, the NSF gave a joint $12 million grant to the university and UC Irvine.
“There was $130 million left to hand out and rather than giving each project $12 [million] to $13 million dollars, they decided to give everyone at least some money, so they lowered the maximum amount to $3.9 million dollars,” Ramsey said.
The third consecutive year of awards from the agency highlights the campus’ expertise in the subject area, according to Ramsey.
“We are one of the top institutions in the nation for information technology,” he said.
