...
The iPlant Board of Directors-constituted Review Team met in early March 2009 and recommended immediate engagement with the iPlant Tree of Life (iPToL) Grand Challenge Project Team to initiate a two-year project constructing a Phylogenetics CyberInfrastructure. In early May 2009, members from iPlant's iPlant’s Executive Team and Engagement Team met with leads from the iPToL Grand Challenge Team to develop a management plan and create a roadmap for work to be conducted over the next two years. Collaborative implementation was organized into working groups with focused development goals. The four main working groups are: Big Trees, Data Assembly, Tree Reconciliation, and Ancestral Character State Reconstruction. Two crosscutting working groups to develop shared data and compute infrastructure are Data Integration and Visualization.
...
Two units of summer support ($10k per unit) are allocated for Brian O'Meara O’Meara as project champion. Two $50k fellowships are allocated for one postdoc and one graduate student. Funding for iPlant staff members, meetings, workshops, as well as EOT activities come from other sources and are not included in the working group budget.
...
Broadly, iPlant is designed to build cyberinfrastructure and not generate new data. Thus, the Board of Director's Director’s recommend that iPlant not focus on new algorithm development but instead on providing HPC and scale-up expertise in support of existing software. The key is to be able to solve problems that need to be solved. There is risk assumed in achieving these goals. Best practices will be used to attack problems and if progress is not being made, there is the possibility of bringing the problem to the Scientific Opportunities Team to discuss the possibility of developing a proposal regarding algorithm development.
iPlant's iPlant’s Engagement Team and developers will be the people with the most knowledge of the shared discovery environment. It will be necessary that the work of the Ancestral Character State working group complements that of the other working groups, yet remains independent enough that delay in the progress of one group does not dramatically affect the progress of other groups (i.e., doing independent contrasts on large trees will be useful to many researchers even before the 100,000 taxon plant tree is created).
...