NSF Cyberinfrastructure

NSF Cyberinfrastructure Report

REPORT SUMMARY

The central goal of the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program (ACP) is to:

The report says that the scientific disciplines must take the lead but also must give back to the research community in a way that will result in building more "ubiquitous, comprehensive, digital environments".

Many contemporary projects require "effective federation" of distributed resources (data and facilities). There is no standard term for such environments that are enabled by cyberinfrastructure - some names in use are collaboratory, co-laboratory, grid community/network, virtual science community and e-science community.

The following ideas were also highlighted in the executive summary and should be of interest to the ADEC research and education community:

• an effective response should be interagency and international in scope
• this challenges our fundamental understanding of computer and information science and engineering as well as part of social science
• this vision of science and engineering research involves significant educational dimensions. The research community needs more broadly trained personnel with blended expertise in disciplinary science or engineering, mathematical and computational modeling, numerical methods, visualization and the sociotechnical understanding about working in new grid or collaboratory organizations. These environments can: enable people to work routinely with colleagues at distant institutions (beyond research universities and including junior scientists & students)
• the new tools, resources, human capacity building and organizational structures emerging from these activities will eventually have even broader beneficial impact on the future of education at all levels and all types of educational institutions. The report predicts that we will see fundamental shifts in the way research is practiced including:
• more simulations and modeling
• visualizing results from many perspectives
• advanced computing use in all sciences
• primary access to research findings through the web, rather than pre-prints and publications (already happening)
• crucial data collections accessible remotely
• collaboration across time zones, sharing data, complementary expertise, ideas and access to special facilities without travel

ACP will invest principally in software, following the successful model of the Internet, with targeted and coordinated government investment in infrastructure and applications, experimentation and refinement in actual uses, and coordinated commercialization of both elements together.

Cyberinfrastructure includes computing cycles and broadband networking, massive storage and managed information, as well as leadership on shared standards, middleware and basic applications for scientific computation. Cyberinfrastructure is more than high performance computing and connectivity. It is focused on sharing, efficiency, making greater capabilities available across the science and engineering research communities. It facilitates new applications and collaboration and interoperability across institutions and disciplines.

The examples given in the report discuss revolutionizing science and engineering in:

• Atmospheric Science
• Forestry
• Ocean Science
• Environmental Science and Engineering
• Space Weather
• Computer Science and Engineering
• Biology/Bioinformatics
• Medicine
• Physics
• Astronomy
• Engineering
• Social and Behavioral Sciences

The report discusses the importance of international collaboration. Projects are expected to be large and comprehensive.

EDUCATIONAL NEEDS AND IMPACTS

This section talks about a new work force that is a mixed science and technology professional and improved computer-supported collaborative work including addressing the social dimensions of collaboratories so they are better codified, disseminated and applied in the design and refinement of new knowledge environments. Continuing education and distance learning are called for in the report.

An important goal of the ACP must be to more effectively include the Minority Serving Institutions - few of these institutions have been meaningfully involved in NSF grants. The paper calls for the type of effort that ADEC is accomplishing through the NSF funded AISEP project. Results in this area require institutions of various types to work together as we do in ADEC.

EPSCoR

ACP will embrace EPSCoR and continue to support this successful, high-impact program. They suggest applying the EPSCoR model more specifically to MSIs.

The paper also addresses participation by the physically challenged.

There was very little addressing access by the wider public in the report.

Need for Trusted and Enduring Organizations - this was repeatedly heard by the panel members preparing the report.

The emergence of ubiquitous wireless networks offers another big opportunity. Billions of Internet connected cell phones, embedded processors, hand-held devices, sensors and actuators can lead to new applications in many fields. The combination of wireless LANS, the third generation of cellular phones, satellites and the increasing use of unlicensed wireless bands will cover the world with connectivity enabling both scientific research and emergency preparedness to utilize a wide variety of "sensornets".

The need to develop knowledge environments for multiple uses is slightly mentioned indicating that "in some cases this means to design such environments with the intent to (at least eventually) support both research and education and build further synergy between them". (This is a rather disappointing nod to education - while the report discusses digital libraries and information science, it is much less detailed with respect to education/learning and in mentoring social scientists indicates that they must work constructively with scientists and technologists.)

On page 70 of the report, it is noted that cyberinfrastructure raises numerous social issues i.e. security, privacy, intellectual property and use of information technology in support of research communities in collaborative work across distance, organizations and disciplines and associated with new modes of scholarly community. It is anticipated that a portion of these funds will support individual investigators exploring ground-breaking new activities - they envision a number of larger multi-investigator projects to explore many technical and social issues and mixtures of the two and involve substantial prototyping, testbeds and experimentation.

The report also envisions discipline scientists partnering with colleagues from their fields who can contribute to designing technical approaches to advance knowledge in new ways.

The NSF Middleware initiative and Cyberinfrastructure software centers (possibly 10 to be supported) would be at a scale necessary to attack significant challenges of developing standards and production software for grids, programming tools and data access and analysis.

For more details on the following, see the report: High-end general-purpose centers
Data repositories
Digital libraries
Networking
Application Service Centers

A number of websites are included as references at the end of the report.

• NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure
• The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
• Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure
• NSF Middleware Initiative
• George E. Brown, J. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation
• US National Virtual Observatory
• National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
• The National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
• The Grid Physics Network
• The Space Physics and Aieromy Research Collaboratory (SPARC)
• The Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN)
• DOE National Collaboratories Program
• DOE Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing
• U.K. Research Councils E science Program
• Japanese Earth Simulator Center
• Web Services Activity
• Preparing for the Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the Research University, National Academy Press, 2002
• Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
• The Globus Project
• The Condor Project
• Cactus Programming Framework
• Network Weather Service Project
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Los Alamos National Laboratory