NSF Org:	OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)
Recipient:	UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Initial Amendment Date:	September 7, 2018
Latest Amendment Date:	September 7, 2018
Award Number:	1841487
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Bogdan Mihaila bmihaila@nsf.gov  (703)292-8235 OAC  Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE  Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date:	October 1, 2018
End Date:	September 30, 2021 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount:	$400,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date:	$400,000.00
Funds Obligated to Date:	FY 2018 = $400,000.00
History of Investigator:	Robert Gardner (Principal Investigator) rwg@hep.uchicago.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office:	University of Chicago 5801 S ELLIS AVE CHICAGO IL  US  60637-5418 (773)702-8669
Sponsor Congressional District:	01
Primary Place of Performance:	University of Chicago 5620 S. Ellis Avenue Chicago IL  US  60637-1468
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District:	01
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI):	ZUE9HKT2CLC9
Parent UEI:	ZUE9HKT2CLC9
NSF Program(s):	CESER-Cyberinfrastructure for
Primary Program Source:	01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s):	020Z, 062Z
Program Element Code(s):	768400
Award Agency Code:	4900
Fund Agency Code:	4900
Assistance Listing Number(s):	47.070

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the NSF-funded LIGO Observatory made the first-ever detection of gravitational waves, from the collision of two black holes, a discovery that was recognized by the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2017, LIGO and its sister observatory Virgo in Italy made the first detection of gravitational waves from another extreme event in the Universe - the collision of two neutron stars. Gamma rays from the same neutron star collision were also simultaneously detected by NASA's Fermi space telescope. Meanwhile, the NSF-funded IceCube facility, located at the U.S. South Pole Station, has made the first detection of high-energy neutrinos from beyond our galaxy, giving us unobstructed views of other extreme objects in Universe such as supermassive black holes and supernova remnants. The revolutionary ability to observe gravitational waves, neutrinos, and optical and radio waves from the same celestial events has launched the era of "Multi-Messenger Astrophysics," an exciting new field supported by one of NSF's ten Big Ideas, "Windows on the Universe".

The success of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics depends on building new data infrastructure to seamlessly share, integrate, and analyze data from many large observing instruments. The investigators propose a cohesive, federated, national-scale research data infrastructure for large instruments, focused initially on LIGO and IceCube, to address the need to access, share, and combine science data, and make the entire data processing life cycle more robust. The novel working model of the project is a multi-institutional collaboration comprising the LIGO and IceCube observatories, Internet2, and platform integration experts. The investigators will conduct a fast-track two-year effort that draws heavily on prior and concurrent NSF investments in software, computing and data infrastructure, and international software developments including at CERN. Internet2 will establish data caches inside the national network backbone to optimize the LIGO data analysis. The goal is to achieve a data infrastructure platform that addresses the production needs of LIGO and IceCube while serving as an exemplar for the entire scope of Multi-messenger Astrophysics and beyond. In the process, the investigators are prototyping a redefinition of the role the academic internet plays in supporting science.

This project is supported by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

This project explored the creation of a data infrastructure for multi-messenger astrophysics. We focused on IceCube and LIGO, and explored both top down placement models as well as bottoms up caching. The latter is somewhat analogous to "content delivery networks (CDN)" as used by companies like netflix to make data available anywhere at any time. 

The main lasting impact of the project is the creation of a global data federation for open science. This includes network and endpoint caches in USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia at this point. While it was pioneered with LIGO as application driver, it is now used very broadly by a wode range of science projects, as well as individual scientists. Global science collaborations of various sizes benefit from the global infrastructure, while individual scientists and their students at universities and colleges across the USA benefit from the US deployment.

This infrastructure is different from commercial CDNs in that people can join their data on their storage systems at their home institutions. It's as if I could join my desktop computer to YouTube rather than having to upload my videos. Whenever I want to stop sharing my data, I simply disconnect and deregister. In addition, a researcher can share their data only with a limited set of collaborators, instead of all of the scientific community. Data that needs to be validated before it is ready for general consumptiion can thus be kept private among the collaborators that create the data. Researchers thus have a very different level of control over data sharing than they have in commercial systems like YouTube.

The global nature of the infrastructure also allows for global consortia to develop where different international partners share different sets of data with the consortium. This is used for example by the global network of gravitational wave observatories such that the observatories on different continents upload their data on servers in their continent that are owned by their respective collaborators. In kind contributions of local resources to the global consortium are thus possible. 

 

Last Modified: 06/03/2022
Modified by: Robert Gardner

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