What is Cyber Infrastructure

Cyber Infrastructure is a term that typically refers to IT systems that provide advanced technological and sociological solutions to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people enabling derivation of scientific theories and knowledge.

Cyber Infrastructure consists of computing systems, data storage systems, advanced instruments and data repositories all linked together by high-performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthrough otherwise not possible. Data search and discovery, security, user private data storage, tracking data provenance are the four major components of cyberinfrastructure.

Cyber-infrastructure is a technology which is also known as e-research, e-science, and e-infrastructure in Europe, Australia, and Asia respectively. Cyber-infrastructure is the reason that it has been possible to bring together large data sets, high-performance computing, remote sensors, middleware, and sophisticated applications which includes modelling, simulation and visualization as well. It consists of data storage and computing systems, advanced instruments, visualization environments, data repositories and people. These all are linked together by high-speed networks. This makes difficult and almost impossible discoveries possible, which otherwise would have been difficult and time taking.

The U.S. National Science Foundation first used the term Cyber-infrastructure and the term CI was first and it refers to information technology systems that provide specifically dominant and advanced capabilities. The main goal of creating and implementing this is simply to make total use of advanced information technology systems as easy as possible. Processors, storage devices, sensors and different physical assets are all part of a Cyber-infrastructure.

Cyber-infrastructure is much more than about just the connectivity. It’s more than how it connects people with advanced networks and sophisticated applications running on powerful computer systems. It actually even involves people, who help to generate knowledge. Cyber-infrastructure is an integral part of organizations such as the U.S. Department of Energy, the NASA, and a few others. CI is not limited to the sciences, but can also serve the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It is highly dependent on the infrastructure that forms the bridge between high-speed networks and high performance and highly reliable computational resources.

The usage, availability, and performance are controlled by the management system and the entire system has the job of protecting these assets. Data can be of any size and previous aggregations of collected data or live feeds even from remote sensors located anywhere in the world. These Datasets can be distributed with even neurological and physiological data coming from different sources.  These data which are collected and archived are analyzed on a scale that was previously unimaginable. Cyber-infrastructure has the power to tackle the mountain of information and allows researchers to answer questions that a decade ago wouldn’t have been asked and couldn’t have been answered. CI makes the data about all the world’s languages accessible to researchers and has tremendous potential to transform the study of language.