Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) was launched in 2004 as a collaboration involving the State of North Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), Duke University, and North Carolina State University. RENCI is organizationally structured as a research institute within UNC-CH, and its main campus is located in Chapel Hill, NC, a few miles from the UNC-CH campus. RENCI has engagement centers at UNC-CH, Duke University (Durham), and North Carolina State University (Raleigh).

RENCI's founding director was Daniel A. Reed; Stanley C. Ahalt is the current director. RENCI employs over 80 staff members.

Mission statement RENCI's current mission is: "to develop and deploy advanced technologies to enable research discoveries and practical innovations."RENCI Website, renci.org. RENCI achieves its mission by partnering with academic researchers, governmental policy makers, and industry leaders to engage in research and development aimed at solving critical challenges in several focus areas: data science and cyberinfrastructure; environmental sciences; and biomedical and health sciences.

History RENCI was founded in January 2004 by Daniel A. Reed, PhD, with funding from the State of North Carolina, UNC-CH, North Carolina State University, and Duke University.The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (2004-2010). Annual Financial Reports. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available at: http://research.unc.edu/offices/vice-chancellor/about/annual-reports.The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (2011-2014). Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available at: http://finance.unc.edu/reports-and-data/financial-statements-archive. Dr. Reed formerly served as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Chief Architect for the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid initiative, and Member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. In May 2004, Alan Blatecky joined RENCI as deputy director. Mr. Blatecky formerly served as executive director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and head of the NSF Middleware initiative.

RENCI's initial mission statement was: to serve as a multidisciplinary institute bridging academe, commerce and society to enrich and empower human potential, create multi-institutional partnerships, and develop and deploy world-leading computational infrastructure.

In December 2005, RENCI received $5.9M in funding from the State of North Carolina for FY2005-2006 and $11.8M in recurring funds for "staff support, computer operations and equipment." This funding was critical for RENCI as it developed a statewide infrastructure to create a virtual organization and leverage that infrastructure and the expertise of RENCI staff in order to engage in federally funded projects of interest to the State. RENCI's initial focus was on applying cyber technologies and advanced analytics to coastal disaster planning, mitigation, and response. RENCI has since engaged in diverse partnerships throughout North Carolina and across the nation. Those partnerships have yielded numerous federal grant awards, thus providing the organization with an additional revenue stream.

RENCI underwent a change in leadership in 2007, with the departure of Dr. Reed and the appointment of Mr. Blatecky as interim director. RENCI implemented its first ever strategic planning process during this time. The process led to a revised mission statement: The Renaissance Computing Institute, a multi-institutional organization, brings together multidisciplinary experts and advanced technological capabilities to address pressing research issues and to find solutions to complex problems that affect the quality of life in North Carolina, our nation and the world.

In 2009, Stanley C. Ahalt, PhD, was appointed to the position of director. Dr. Ahalt previously served as executive director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) and was a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ohio State University (OSU). Upon arriving at RENCI, Dr. Ahalt received a joint appointment as professor in the department of computer science at UNC-CH.

Ashok Krishnamurthy, PhD, was appointed as deputy director in February 2013. Dr. Krishnamurthy was previously the director of research and scientific development at OSC and associate professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering at OSU.

Under the leadership of Drs. Ahalt and Krishnamurthy, RENCI expanded its staff numbers, external partners, and breadth of activities. Several key partnerships and initiatives have been launched. The first is a partnership with the School of Medicine at UNC-CH on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Translational and Clinical Science award, which led to the establishment of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute in 2008 (NC TraCS). Drs. Ahalt and Krishnamurthy serve as director and co-director, respectively, of the Biomedical Informatics Service within NC TraCS. A second key activity was the founding of the Water Science Software Institute (WSSI), which was co-founded by RENCI and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) in September 2012. A third key activity was the creation of the National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) in February 2013. The NCDS is headquartered at RENCI and includes members drawn from academics, industry, and government. Finally, a fourth key activity was the establishment of the iRODS Consortium in March 2013. The iRODS Consortium also is headquartered at RENCI and includes a diverse international membership.

Current leadership Ashok Krishnamurthy, director Rebecca Boyles, deputy director Brian Blanton, director of earth data sciences Terrell Russell, director of data management and executive director of the iRODS Consortium Rob Fowler, director of high-performance computing Rick Luettich, chief domain scientist in coastal models Kirk C. Wilhelmsen, chief domain scientist in genomics and director of biomedical research initiatives

Key research and development focus areas and technologies

Data science and cyberinfrastructure RENCI has a number of active research programs that are aimed at developing and deploying advanced computing and networking capabilities. Many of the resultant technologies are open source. For example, the open source ExoGENI (Exo-Global Environment for Network Innovation) is being developed as part of the NSF-funded GENI initiative.Baldin, I., Ruth, P., Xin, Y., Mandal, A., Chase, J., Tilson, J., & Prasad. S. (2013). Visions of a Future Internet: The ExoGENI Example. RENCI/NCDS, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. .Baldin, I., Xin, Y., Mandal, A., Ruth, P., Heerman, C., & Chase, J. (2012). ExoGENI: A Multi-Domain Infrastructure-as-a-Service Testbed. Proceedings of the 8th International ICST Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TridentCom). Available at: https://www.cs.duke.edu/~chase/exogeni.pdf. ExoGENI functions as a federated, cloud-based Networked Infrastructure-as-a-Service (NIaaS) platform for dynamic provisioning of networking, storage, and compute resources. ADAMANT (Adaptive Data-Aware Multi-domain Application Network Topologies), also funded by the NSF, builds upon ExoGENI. ADAMANT integrates the Pegasus (workflow management) and HT Condor scientific workflow system with the ExoGENI NIaaS platform to orchestrate the execution of large-scale scientific workflows over distributed cloud or traditional high-performance computing resources. iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) was developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Centers at UNC-CH and the University of California, San Diego and is currently maintained by RENCI. iRODS is an open source middleware technology designed to provide policy-based control over data access, movement, use, and archiving across geographical sites, disparate storage technologies, and multiple user groups, each with varying policies regarding data access and use.Rajasekar, A., Moore, R., Wan, M., Schroeder, W., & Hasan, A. (2010b). Applying Rules as Policies for Large-Scale Data Sharing. Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulation (ISMS), 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulation. Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5416072.Schmitt, C., Wilhelmsen, K., Krishnamurthy, A., Ahalt, S. & Fecho, K. (2013b). Security and Privacy in the Era of Big Data: iRODS, a Technological Solution to the Challenge of Implementing Security and Privacy Policies and Procedures. RENCI, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available at: http://www.renci.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/0313WhitePaper-iRODS.pdf.Fortner, B., Ahalt, S., Coposky, J., Fecho, K., Krishnamurthy, A., Moore, R., Rajasekar, A., Schmitt, C., & Schroeder, W. (2014). Control Your Data: iRODS, the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System. RENCI, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available at: http://renci.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/0214WhitePaper-iRODS-2-FINAL-v6.pdf. RADII (Resource Aware Data-centric collaborative Infrastructure; web citation) integrates GENI's ORCA (Open Resource Control Architecture) with iRODS to dynamically provision a distributed cloud-based infrastructure for multi-institutional, data-driven research collaborations. RADII accomplishes this through software designed to model research data and map data elements, computations, and storage onto the underlying physical infrastructure of iRODS. DataBridge aims to provide a multi-dimensional sociometric network system for sharing long-tail data collections.Rajasekar, A., Kum, H., Crosas, M., Crabtree, J., Sankaran, S., Lander, H., Carsey, T., King, G., & Zhan, J. (2013a). The DataBridge. Science Journal, ASE. Available at: http://databridge.web.unc.edu/files/2013/01/DataBridge_Journal_Final.pdf.Rajasekar, A., Sankaran, S., Lander, H., Carsey, T., Crabtree, J., Kum, H., Crosas, M., King, G., & Zhan, J. (2013b). Sociometric Methods for Relevancy Analysis of Long Tail Science Data. ASE/IEEE International Conference on Big Data. Available at: http://databridge.web.unc.edu/files/2013/01/Databridge-ConferenceVersion-final.pdf.Crabtree, J. (2013). DataBridge: Building an e-Science Collaboration Environment Tool for Linking Diverse Datasets into a Sociometric Network. IASSIST 2013. Available at: http://databridge.web.unc.edu/files/2013/07/IASSIST2013DataBridgeFinal.ppt. DataBridge is an open source collaboration tool that allows scientists to explore available data sets and their relevant algorithms and define semantic bridges to link to and access diverse data sets within the sociometric network.

Environmental sciences