1. Collaboration-driven trips to international research sites in Mexico, Argentina, Spain, China, India, France, and Germany
   • 6-10 week trips during the summer
   • Semester-long trips in Fall and Spring semesters
2. PIRE Fellowships, up to $10,000, will be awarded to superbly-qualified PhD students
3. Graduate Assistants will retain their existing assistantship support during their trips.
4. Earn credits toward your degree while traveling abroad.
5. Cutting-edge research co-supervised by SCIS faculty and international research partners:
   • Cyberinfrastructure Enablement
   • Grid Computing and Super Computing
   • Hurricane Mitigation & Disaster Management
   • Bioinformatics
   • Health Informatics

PIRE prepares you to compete in the Global Information Technology Marketplace. SCIS students selected by the PIRE program will become part of a prestigious international research network focusing on using cyberinfrastructure to solve challenging societal problems while training a generation of globally-oriented IT professionals who will become leaders in industry and academia.

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is a critical enabler of national importance for expanding scientific discovery and industrial applications. To realize CI's full potential, domain scientists need to easily run their existing applications on the CI available to them. Scientists also need to be able to design their future applications in a way that allows them to take advantage of an ever changing and growing CI. However, the current technology used to create CI applications presents two problems: (1) they are either too generic and do not provide the right level of abstraction to allow experts in diverse domains to easily "code" their application logic; or (2) they are too specific, in most cases following a stove-pipe development process, resulting in rigid and expensive solutions that do not promote the reuse of commonalities across domains.

Leveraging an innovative and successful international industry and university partnership called Latin American Grid (LA Grid) with funding from the US National Science Foundation's Partnerships for International Research and Education (NSF PIRE) program, Florida International University's (FIU) School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida Atlantic University's (FAU) Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and IBM Research Worldwide (China, France, India, Japan, USA), together with the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), Tsinghua University (China), the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina), the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), are developing methodologies, platforms, and tools for creating CI applications in a way that eases the application development process and makes the resulting applications more adaptive to future changes of CI. The approach is application-driven and is focused on: (1) supporting CI-enablement for carefully chosen critical application domains, e.g. hurricane mitigation, bioinformatics and healthcare, and (2) developing common methodologies, services and tools for CI-enabled applications in these domains. The technology and tools created by the partners have broad significance and utility to both scientific discovery and industrial/societal applications.

Students from U.S. universities are engaged and each participant receives multiple perspectives in each of three different aspects of collaboration as they work with local and international researchers, in academic and industrial research labs, on basic and applied research projects. Consequently, PIRE students are able to participate in the full research pipeline from inception of ideas, through basic research, to practical applications with a wide choice of collaborators and international experiences. By training a globally engaged workforce and by driving sustainable international partnerships with shared infrastructure and resources, through which faculty, students and industry scientists/engineers collaborate to solve critical and nationally-important complex scientific problems, this PIRE is expected to have a major impact on American competitiveness.