Florida International University
FIU is ranked by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a Doctoral/Research University-Extensive, the highest ranking in its classification system. FIU has more than 32,686 students, 1,100 full-time faculty, and 90,000 alumni, making it the largest university in South Florida and placing it among the nation’s 25 largest colleges and universities. It is unique in that it has the highest proportion of international students and faculty of any major university in the country. The current makeup includes 52.5% Hispanic, 13.7% African American, 3.62% Asian, as well as a 56.4% female student body (see Figure 1). As such, FIU is a Minority Institution with the largest contingent of Hispanic students of any doctoral-granting university and awards more Bachelors degrees to Hispanics than any other school within the continental US. Its mission includes being the principal educational and research interface between the State universities and South and Central America and the Caribbean. AMPATH provides opportunities for Hispanic minority students at the University to work on the project in technology and administrative positions.

The FIU nuclear physics group was established in 1995 when 8 positions (6 experimental and 2 theoretical) were created in partnership with the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab). The Jefferson Lab-based group does experiments using the 6 GeV electron accelerator, CEBAF. The physics is focused on the kinematical region where traditional nuclear degrees of freedom give way to quark degrees of freedom. This non-perturbative QCD region is interesting precisely because of the inherent difficulties in describing the interactions.

The FIU group acts as spokespersons on 6 experiments focused on the nature and character of strange quark production via electromagnetic probes. Jefferson Lab has 3 experimental halls (A, B and C) where FIU is studying both the basic N(e,e'K+)Y process (where N is a nucleon and Y is a hyperon) and the subsequent interaction of the hyperon via the A(e,e'K+) hypernuclear production. The basic process off the nucleon is being studied in all 3 halls, with experiments in Hall A designed to measure the unpolarized response functions in the cross section using a proton target, experiments in Hall B looking at the polarization transfer, induced polarization and analyzing power for the reaction (again with a hydrogen target). This series of experiments probes the nature of both the electromagnetic form factors of the kaon as well as the production nature and resonance coupling of the hyperon. In Hall C, light nuclei are being used to determine the equivalent unpolarized cross sections on the neutron. In Halls A and C there are also a series of experiments looking at bound states of the hyperon, where the hyperon has replaced a proton in the nucleus. Such reactions provide crucial information on the nature of QCD. The group is spokesperson on 2 additional experiments where Jefferson Lab’s kinematical limits are pushed to explore the hard scattering in knockout of either a proton (in the D(e,e'p) reaction) or a vector meson (in coherent electroproduction off the deuteron). The group is also taking part in the planning and construction of the GlueX experiment for Hall D.

PI Pete Markowitz and Senior Personnel Laird Kramer are members of that experimental group. The group’s previous experience in educational outreach includes both Jlab programs (TRAC, CHROME and BEAMS) as well as Miami-Dade County Public Schools Advanced Academic Program with High School students.

The College of Education (COE) at FIU brings established partnerships with local schools, a history of outreach, and experience with several successful models such as the Partnership in Academic Communities (PAC) and SUS Partners for Excellence in Education – Mathematics Pilot programs. The pedagogy of teaching science and mathematics has been the focus of research by the group for many years, as evidenced by the Mathematical Modeling workshops carried on by the group. The central focus of the COE group has been to improve the educational opportunities and successes of populations under-represented in mathematics, science and education. One highly successful example of the group’s work is the Partnership in Academic Communities program (PAC) that integrates science mathematics and technology. At any one time, approximately 120 students participate. At-risk students join PAC in the seventh grade and attend programs at FIU daily throughout the year until they graduate from high school. Successful participants in the program receive a scholarship to study at FIU.

Over the last two years, FIU’s advanced research and education networking unit has developed an international, high-performance research connection point in Miami, Florida, called AMPATH (AMericasPATH). One of AMPATH’s goals is to enable wide-bandwidth digital communications in support of globally distributed computational grids for an overarching scientific endeavor, such as the CMS experiment, which is additionally a catalyst for the development of necessary standards based communications. Additionally, AMPATH, with project support from the National Science Foundation, works with other global e-science collaborations, such as the Gemini Observatory to help provide the networking that has enabled Gemini’s success in “blazing a new Internet pathway which will provide its globally separated twin telescopes with a reliable data transfer connection able to handle the enormous amounts of scientific information created by Gemini’s sophisticated instrumentation. ”. Co-PI Alvarez along with the Director of AMPATH and Sr. Personnel on this proposal, Julio Ibarra, lead a team of five in operating and advancing AMPATH’s mission and technological capabilities. Co-PI of AMPATH and Associate Director of Technology Services, Heidi Alvarez, holds primary responsibility for matters related to funding the project. She develops and maintains relationships with world-class US and international scientists and funding program directors with research projects and collaborations in the region. The business of developing, submitting and administering grants in consideration of a variety of disciplines and collaborators falls under her purview.

University of Florida (UF)
UF is a public, land-grant research university located in Gainesville, Florida. The state's oldest, largest and most comprehensive university, UF is among the nation’s most academically diverse public universities. Since 1985 it has been a member of the Association of American Universities, and offers more programs on a single campus than all but a few U.S. universities. A land-grant university with a distinguished record of developing Florida agriculture through research and extension services, Florida is among the nation's leading research universities as categorized by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Its 4,000 faculty members attracted $379 million in research and training grants in 2000-2001. With 46,500 students, Florida has 21 colleges and schools and more than 100 research, service and education centers, bureaus and institutes. More than 100 undergraduate majors are offered, while the Graduate School coordinates almost 200 graduate programs. Professional degree programs include dentistry, law, medicine, pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

Florida’s high-energy physics group consists of seven theorists and six experimentalists and has been continuously funded by DOE since the early 1980s. The group participates in several experimental efforts, including CLEO at Cornell, CDF at Fermilab, CMS at CERN and a number of other activities including the LIGO gravitational wave program and an experiment searching for fundamental particles called axions . The group is heavily involved in the CMS research program and Grid research and deployment. Five faculty members devote at least 50% of their time to CMS construction, trigger projects, software development, production simulations and physics analysis activities. Florida leads the Endcap Muon construction project, a $40M project and one of the few major subsystems led by US physicists. Paul Avery is University of Florida Research Professor and Principal Investigator of two NSF funded Grid projects, GriPhyN63 ($11.9M) and the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL62) ($14.1M). These Grid projects involve, respectively, 16 and 20 institutions from around the country, as well as partners in Europe and Asia. Avery’s CMS/GriPhyN/iVDGL Grid group has five senior members and another four people will be hired in Fall 2002 to take part in several national and international activities.

UF has two other strong networking activities that play a role in this proposal. The first is the High-performance Computing and Simulation (HCS) Research Laboratory , led by Prof. Alan George of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which works in close collaboration with Avery's Grid group and the iVDGL. HCS was cited as an NSA center of excellence in high-performance networking and computing, and is active in several areas of high-speed networking and large-scale distributed systems research that will support the FIU center. These areas include: scalable on-line distributed health monitoring, failure detection, and consensus for robust computing and communications; scalable on-line distributed performance monitoring for adaptive computing and communications; and simulative and experimental analysis and optimization of network and system architectures, protocols, and services for guaranteed end-to-end performance. The second is OIT-Network services, which manages UF’s OC-12 connection to Abilene and works closely on several projects with Internet2. OIT-Network Services is an active participant in the Internet2 K20 initiative, where it sponsors the Florida Information Resource Network (FIRN ) connection to the Abilene network. Starting in late 2002, this connection will bring innovators in K-12, community colleges and libraries throughout the State into Internet2 network via the UCAID Sponsored Education Group Participant (SEGP) process to the research community via Internet2 and AMPATH.

The Florida HEP group trains students through the NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program and teachers through the QuarkNet program. A new proposal is being submitted to NSF in Fall 2002 that will extend the REU program to students working in GriPhyN and iVDGL activities throughout the US.
The Partnership in Global Learning (PGL ) offers another possibility for collaborative outreach. PGL is building an international university/corporate alliance to promote and share e-learning in the areas of K-12 teacher training, university teaching and research, and corporate training. PGL, whose charter members include three major universities in Brazil, has formed alliances with 35 secondary schools in Florida, Mexico and Brazil.

Florida State University (FSU)
FSU is a comprehensive, public research university located in Tallahassee, Florida, the capital of the State of Florida. FSU is a designated Research I university by the Carnegie Foundation. The student body is over 36,000 students, including about 8,000 graduate students. FSU’s colleges and schools offer courses of study in 26 major disciplines, including 96 baccalaureate degree programs covering 225 fields, 100 master's degree programs covering 191 fields, two authorized professional degrees in eight fields, and 72 doctoral degree programs covering 135 fields. Out of 2,000 faculty members, the teaching faculty number 1,400. In 2002 US News and World Report ranked the FSU graduate physics program as 38th in the nation, following closely behind such prestigious universities as Duke and Purdue. FSU and UF jointly run the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which employs such renowned scientists as Nobel Prize winner John R. Schrieffer, the lab’s chief scientist.

The FSU high-energy physics group is composed of nine permanent experimental and four theoretical physicists. The experimental programs are at Fermilab (D0 experiment) and CERN (CMS experiment). The activities include detector R&D, design, construction, calibration, data taking and data analysis. The D0 experiment is currently taking data with the upgraded detector partially designed and built by FSU personnel. D0 is an International Collaboration that includes six South and Central American Institutions. The high-energy program has been continuously funded by the US DOE (or its predecessor) for over the past 40 years. The group has hosted one of the original Quarknet outreach programs and has produced master teachers, who now help other high school science teachers. The HEP researchers have also been very active in the Research Experiences of Undergraduate (REU) program funded by the NSF. The HEP group also participates in the State of Florida Young Scholar Program, where 30 high school Juniors are chosen to come to FSU for 6 weeks to work with active scientists. The HEP group started the Saturday Morning Physics at FSU, which attracts about 200 high school students for eight Saturday mornings each year in the Fall semester.
Other research groups within the physics department include the medium energy physics headquartered at Jefferson Laboratory and Brookhaven National Lab/RHIC. At Jlab FSU physicists were co-leaders of the CLAS experiment and presently working on GlueX upgrade in Hall D. Recently this group set up a GRID computing between FSU and JLAB. The Nuclear group has a superconducting Tandem accelerator that provides about 60 MeV per charge. The material science group heads the Martech program, which is a solid-state program in several departments. Since the arrival of the national High Magnetic Field Lab, the study of phenomena at high fields has become a priority.

FSU has a long history of providing major computing services to the science community. In the 1980s FSU had one of the few university-based supercomputers, and acquired in 2001 a 768 processor processing facility that serves a number of academic disciplines. FSU plans to contribute substantially to the iVDGL project as a natural extension of its computing infrastructure.

California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
Caltech, located in Pasadena, California, is a small, coeducational university dedicated to exceptional instruction and research in engineering and science. The student body is composed of about 900 undergraduate and 1,100 graduate students who under the guidance of the faculty maintain the highest standards of scholarship and intellectual achievement. Most of Caltech’s graduate programs in science (including physics) and engineering are rated among the top few in the nation, and several are ranked first among Ph. D granting institutions in any given year. With an outstanding faculty – including several Nobel Laureates – and such off-campus facilities as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Palomar Observatory, the W. M. Keck Observatory, Caltech is one of the world's major research centers. Caltech’s unusual commitments to undergraduate education and research at all levels are reflected in its unequalled level of investment per student, and the research funding per faculty member received from government and private sources. 40% of the undergraduate student body participates in term-time and/or summer research.

Caltech’s high-energy physics faculty includes six experimentalists and nine theorists. Current experiments include BaBar at SLAC, CLEO at Cornell, MINOS at Fermilab, and CMS at LHC. The HEP faculty also is involved in and leads the LIGO collaboration. The Caltech CMS group, led by H. Newman, includes 9 Ph. D physicists and 10 software and network engineers, in addition to Ph. D students in physics and crystal development specialists. The group is focused on the development and exploitation of the experiment’s precision lead tungstate crystal calorimeter, and its distributed computing and software systems for collaborative data analysis. Newman, the US CMS Collaboration Board Chair, originated and has had responsibility for transatlantic networking for HEP since 1982, and his group currently co-manages the operation and development of the “LHCNet” links between CERN and the Starlight in Chicago. He led the MONARC project that developed the worldwide distributed computing model for LHC data analysis, and originated the Data Grid hierarchy concept that has been adopted by the LHC experiments. He is a Principal Investigator of the Particle Physics Data Grid (PPDG ) and a Co-PI of iVDGL. He and his group developed the Virtual Room Videoconferencing System (VRVS8) that went into production in 1997 and is currently running on 12,800 registered hosts in 64 countries. He currently chairs the ICFA Standing Committee on Inter-Regional Connectivity and co-chairs the High Energy and Nuclear Physics Working Group in Internet2.
The Caltech CMS group in HEP has worked in close collaboration with the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) since 1996. This collaboration began with the GIOD (Globally Interconnected Object Databases) project funded by Hewlett Packard, and the first accurate evaluation of the backgrounds to Higgs particle searches using the diphoton signature that took advantage of the large-scale computational resources at CACR and at other NPACI sites. This collaboration led to the development of the first prototype Tier2 center at CACR and SDSC, by the CMS groups at Caltech and UCSD. Caltech and UCSD are two of the four TeraGrid sites (along with Argonne and NCSA).

Caltech, and the CMS group in particular, has been very active in fostering collaborations for science and education on a global scale. This group has provided assistance in the design and implementation of Tier2 centers in developing countries since 1999, including India, Pakistan, China, Korea and Brazil among others. Recent events organized by this group include a lecture series on Grids, Networks and national IT infrastructure at the renowned Nathiagali Summer College in Islamabad Pakistan (founded by Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam in 1974), a session on Grids at UERJ in Rio (and made available to the world scientific community using VRVS and AMPATH) in February 2002, and a session on the “Role of New Technologies in Developing the Information Society” in Bucharest in November 2002.