NSF Major Facilities (MFs) enable unprecedented discoveries across science and engineering disciplines and educate students, researchers, and the public. Innovative and robust cyberinfrastructure (CI) is critical to the MF science missions and is fundamental to the scientific data lifecycle (DLC) that represents the transformation of raw data captured by state-of-the-art scientific instruments into data products that can be visualized, disseminated, and converted into insights and knowledge. The goal of the CI CoE Pilot project (Pilot) effort was to develop a model and a blueprint for a Center of Excellence (CoE) that would serve the CI needs of the MFs  by providing MFs with a central and collaborative space focused on CI issues in MFs.

To achieve the goal, the Pilot provided expertise and active support to cyberinfrastructure practitioners at MFs by engaging with the MFs, understanding their CI needs, understanding the contributions the MFs are making to the CI community, and exploring opportunities for building a broader CI community. To better understand MFs' CI, the Pilot developed and validated a model of the MF data lifecycle that follows the data generation and management within a facility and gained an understanding of how this model captures the fundamental stages that the facilities' data passes through from the scientific instruments to the principal investigators and their teams, to the broader collaborations and the public. The Pilot conducted (a) deep engagements, i.e. focused joint activities with MF teams on selected CI topics that are important yet no fully solved, with several MFs, including National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Seismological Facilities for the Advancement of Geoscience (SAGE), Geodetic Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience (GAGE), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Arecibo Observatory (AO), (b) topical discussions on CI topics relevant to multiple MFs, e.g. Identity Management, and (c) community building through identifying related efforts, collecting and disseminating information about the broad community activities, and maintaining as a living resource for community information. The Pilot also gained an understanding of CI workforce development challenges the MFs face while designing, constructing, and operating their CI and what solutions they are exploring and adopting within their projects.

Through the above activities, the Pilot identified the needs of the MFs in the data lifecycle and workforce development areas, and developed a blueprint for a CI CoE that will learn about and share the CI solutions designed, developed, and/or adopted by the MFs, provide expertise to the largest NSF projects with advanced and complex CI architectures, and foster a community of CI practitioners and researchers. 

The Pilot activities not only enhanced the CI for MFs, but also improved overall productivity and efficiency by providing MFs with expert CI knowledge and support and consequently reduced the burden of individual CI development and management that MFs currently bear. The Pilot made a significant impact on the MF CI community by being a resource providing expertise across MFs and the broader CI ecosystem, and being a broker of communications between MFs. At the same time, the Pilot  gained understanding of how the CI within MFs is being designed and operated, in addition to what the unique issues MFs encounter are. The Pilot?s work with NEON resulted in their users accessing data more efficiently in terms of identity management, data semantics, and visualization. In addition, the Pilot aided NEON/NCAR in designing a prototype of a joint NCAR/NEON platform, impacting the cyberinfrastructure collaborations between NCAR and NEON, which will enable novel scientific research in partnership with ecological and atmospheric science communities. The Pilot also aided SAGE/GAGE in planning for a Common Cloud Platform (CCP), which, when fully implemented, will enable seismologists and geogedists to leverage the SAGE and GAGE MF data for important scientific discoveries in their areas of research.

Last Modified: 11/06/2021
Modified by: Ewa Deelman