Zzzoot

The NSF announced today announced it would be awarding $50M to the iPlant Collective , a " dynamic web portal for the Plant Science Cyberinfrastructure Collaborative Community " to address the ' grand challenges' in plant science. The effort will create a global centre bringing together (virtually and actually) computer scientists, information scientists and plant scientists to work on projects untenable until this project due to such issues as complexity, scale, discipline boundaries, lack of collaboration structures, etc. The centre "... will bring together and leverage the resources and information generated through the National Plant Genome Initiative , enabling more breadth and depth of research in every aspect of plant science " and will serve as a model for other disciplines on how collaborative cyberinfrastructure can be applied.

15 European countries sign pact to develop high-performance computing Once again I get the feeling that Canada is very much at the disadvantage in the research area: it isn't Japan; it isn't the U.S.; and it isn't the E.U. So rich (both monetary- and research- wise) efforts like the above pact (and others from these three large countries/regions) do not happen, as Canada -- for the most part -- almost always has to rely only on its own resources. By having a relatively small economy (compared to Japan, the U.S. and the E.U.) and not part of some larger partnership (NAFTA doesn't really qualify), efforts that usually require a lot of smart people and a lot of money are usually beyond us. (Yes, we have many smart people, but not at the scale that many of these projects demand...). Perhaps we should align ourselves in formal research networks with other similarly positioned countries. Off the top-of-my-head: Australia, New Zealand, Israel, South Africa, India, etc. come to...