| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 2, 2019 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 2, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1933353 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
William Miller
wlmiller@nsf.gov (703)292-7886 OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2019 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $96,402.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $96,402.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3720 S FLOWER ST FL 3 LOS ANGELES CA US 90033 (213)740-7762 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
Marina del Rey CA US 90292-6011 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | CESER-Cyberinfrastructure for |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is a fabric that pervades and enables modern science and has been long-supported at NSF. CI comprises advanced computing, data, software, and networking infrastructure, as well as the necessary specialized human capital. NSF-supported Large Facilities are major scientific research platforms and represent some of the NSF's most substantial investments. Facilities rely heavily on existing CI and new CI capabilities and solutions to support their scientific communities. However, CI used by facilities is currently predominantly built independently by each facility. In 2015, NSF began to support a series of workshops focused on CI for Large Facilities to bring together the facility and CI communities to share common experiences and challenges, discuss potential collaborations and opportunities for leveraging CI within the community. The 2019 Workshop on NSF Large Facilities and CI aims to continue and advance the discussion, exchange, and community building, through a forum for sharing of ideas and experiences and, importantly, prepare for future CI research, development, and deployment.
Specific goals of the workshop include 1) identifying common cyberinfrastructure challenges among facilities, 2) understanding the facility data lifecycle, including the commonalities and differences between data lifecycle stages, 3) exploring opportunities for joint training and education among facilities and large CI projects, 4) sharing experiences in CI project management, and 5) discussing approaches to building a community of CI professionals. An important focus of the workshop will be the CI needed to support the entire facility science lifecycle, which spans data capture and processing, data storage and archiving, and data access, analysis, visualization, and dissemination. The exploration of potential collaborations on common CI challenges is another important aim. Other workshop topics may include computation, network management, and education and workforce development. A workshop report will be posted online to disseminate the discussions and findings to the broader CI community. Participation will be encouraged from a diverse set of CI researchers and professionals at various stages in their careers.
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.
In 2015, the National Science Foundation (NSF) began to support a series of biennial workshops that bring together large facilities (LFs) and cyberinfrastructure (CI) projects to share common experiences and challenges, discuss potential collaborations, and identify opportunities for leveraging CI within the community. The 2019 NSF Workshop on Connecting Large Facilities and Cyberinfrastructure aimed to continue and advance this discussion, enable the exchange of CI solutions and challenges, and foster CI community building.
With a theme of ?Connecting Large Facilities, Connecting CI, Connecting People,? the 2019 workshop emphasized the need to facilitate collaborations among LF and CI projects and recognized the importance of the CI workforce to LF science missions. Specific goals of the workshop included: 1) identifying CI challenges that facilities face when supporting their science missions; 2) exploring the opportunities and obstacles to collaboration between LFs; 3) examining non-technical challenges that influence CI development; and 4) developing ideas for enhancing the CI workforce and building a community of CI professionals.
Based on discussions at the workshop, the participants generated a number of findings that touched upon technical, socio-technical, organizational, and financial aspects of CI.
- The workshop also generated a set of recommended actions in these areas. The recommendations below could be enacted through a combination of community efforts, facility peer interactions, and facility-CI project/platform expertise exchange as well as trusted entities such as dedicated centers. Mechanisms for CI discovery and opportunities for sharing of existing solutions, services, and training resources amongst the LFs and CI projects need to be supported.
- A common repository of knowledge about CI best practices, system descriptions, architectures, use cases, and core system tools should be created and made available to the broad community.
- Trusted intermediaries that can help navigate the ever-changing CI landscape, especially when migrating to new solutions need to be funded. Such entities can also assist in science-driven blueprinting of LFs before CI work begins.
- Communication, collaboration, and community-building efforts across LFs and CI projects should be fostered, and the benefits of belonging to a larger society of professionals need to be communicated.
- Research into new and effective methods for incentivizing collaboration and engagement with multiple facilities on joint projects needs to be supported.
- An effort to capture, analyze, and disseminate LF best practices and management techniques and to identify productive engagement opportunities between science, engineering, innovation, leadership, compliance, and other roles needs to be supported.
- Activities geared toward providing affordable training opportunities, helping structure career paths across facilities, recruiting talent starting with the undergraduate level, creating networking opportunities for technical (especially earlier-career) CI staff across facilities, and helping the community to understand the nature of CI as a career need to be supported.
Last Modified: 09/08/2020
Modified by: Ewa Deelman
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