Is designing cyberinfrastructure or, even, defining it possible?

First Monday

Volumn 12, Issue 6, 2007, Pages

  Freeman, Peter A ^a,b  

^a GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

^b Washington Advisory Group   (United States)

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EID: 34547371150     PISSN: 13960466     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (13)

1. Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure (Atkins Report), January 2003, NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/toc.jsp).
2. Gene Myers, talk at NSF, 9 September 2002.
3. DCS Project, UC Irvine, 1970-1977. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Grid_computing#Origins for a short history and references to early reports.
4. See http://www.nsf.gov/cise/cns/geni/ and http://www.geni.net
5. In a similar, but slightly different context, the term was apparently first used in a press briefing on PDD-63 on 22 May 1998 with Richard Clarke. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberinfrastructure for references.
6. Atkins Report, op.cit., "Charge to the Committee."
7. Ruzena Bajczy, private communication, 2007.
8. Atkins Report, op.cit., p. 1.
9. Private communication to NSF management, 2003.
10. This is the fundamental thesis of Larry Lessig's book Code and other laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
11. GENI, op. cit.
12. GENI, op. cit.
13. The generality of the TCP/IP protocol that has enabled so much expansion is starting to show its limits, however. IPv6 was created to address some of the limitations of number of nodes, but newer services and security requirements may still not be realizable in a practical manner. The lesson is that even fantastic generality has its limits.