The Wireless Grid Innovation Testbed (WiGiT) collaborative effort headed by Syracuse School of Information Studies (iSchool) Professor Lee McKnight was featured in International Science Grid This Week (iGSTW) on May 26, 2010.
“We’re going to have this incredibly huge data set of our early applications and users. Analyzing that will I think be very interesting and we’ll learn a lot,” McKnight was quoted as saying. “So our purpose is to first do experiments on real resources, real networks, and with real people, and second… agree on open specifications, new standards, so that anyone who wants to play can say okay, here’s the open APIs that are recommended by WiGiT.”
The collaboration is comprised of members of multiple academic institutions, including Syracuse University, Virginia Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University and Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal, as well as private sector organizations including: Clear Channel Radio; Qualcomm, Syracuse Research Corporation; SenSyr LLC; Center for Advanced Engineering & Research, Inc.; MOD-ECO; and Wireless Grids Corporation (WGC). Government and Intergovernmental partners include: Knowledge Society Agency Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Portugal; and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris, France.
Recently researchers from other institutions—including University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry—have joined the project.
“We expect to have the process for others to join in more formally set up by July,” McKnight was quoted as saying. “If you join us, you’re consenting to share data on what you do with WiGiT with us. We’re studying you or your use of WiGiT.”
iSGTW is an international, weekly, online science-computing newsletter concentrating on distributed computing, cloud computing and supercomputing and how these types of computing technologies are applied for scientific advancement.
McKnight and his team, which will begin testing alpha software in June, were awarded a two-year $600,000 grant in 2009 from the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation to assist in refining transformative technologies to create markets, bridge the gap between wireless network middleware and grid application layers and accelerate commercialization and adoption of new products and services.