Cyberinfrastructure

• United States federal research funders use the term cyberinfrastructure to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over the Internet beyond the scope of a single institution. In scientific usage, cyberinfrastructure is a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people with the goal of enabling derivation of novel scientific theories and knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberinfrastructure

• Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is not a new technology, per se, or merely a better, faster Internet. CI merges technology, data, and human resources into a seamless whole. While processors, storage devices, sensors, and other physical assets are part of CI, it is more than  connecting  people  with  advanced  networks  and  sophisticated  applications  running  on  powerful  computer  systems—it  isinvolving those people as participants in the generation of knowledge,  giving  them  the  opportunity  to  share  expertise,  tools,  andfacilities.

CI—which  is  known  as e-research,  e-science,  and  e-infrastructure  in  Europe,  Australia, and  Asia—brings  together  high-performance  computing,  remote sensors, large data sets, middleware, and sophisticated applications (modeling, simulation, visualization).

CI depends on a technical infrastructure that knits together high-speed networks with high-performance, high-availability, and high-reliability computational resources
http://www.sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/division_of_information_technology/docs/ci_7_things.pdf