Peter Miksza is breaking barriers for music educators and researchers through his use of Jetstream.

Jetstream is a user-friendly cloud computing environment funded by $13.7 million from the National Science Foundation. The IU-led system gives researchers and students access to computing and data analysis resources on demand—from their tablets, laptops, or desktop computers.

Miksza, an associate professor of music education at the IU Bloomington Jacobs School of Music and affiliate member and liaison of the IU Cognitive Science Program, uses Jetstream to host a large database of information about secondary school public music education programs. Jetstream’s data capacity gives the public, as well as music education researchers and advocates, access to important data so they can better understand the music education landscape.

He has also created a set of apps that make it easier for students and researchers to study music education.

“Having a virtual machine that I can log into has been essential because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to host the pedagogical demonstrations and visualization apps that I created,” Miksza said.

Jetstream is the most recent incarnation of IU’s eminence in grid and cloud computing. IU ran the operations of the Open Science Grid starting in 2012, which supported research resulting in two recent Nobel prizes (Higgs Boson, gravitational waves), and an experimental computing grid called Futuregrid starting in 2008.