| NSF Org: |
TI Translational Impacts |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | September 7, 2022 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | September 7, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 2229642 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Marlon Pierce
mpierce@nsf.gov (703)292-7743 TI Translational Impacts TIP Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships |
| Start Date: | September 15, 2022 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2024 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $298,468.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $298,468.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
107 S INDIANA AVE BLOOMINGTON IN US 47405-7000 (317)278-3473 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
107 S INDIANA AVE BLOOMINGTON IN US 47405-7000 |
| 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): | POSE |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): | |
| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.084 |
ABSTRACT
This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. Exosphere is an innovative web-based interface for non-proprietary cloud computing infrastructure. Exosphere empowers researchers to wield advanced cloud-based research tools without needing advanced systems administrator skills. The project's novelties include: providing a user-friendly dashboard to manage cloud computing, networking, and data storage resources, and providing interactive access to these resources via web browser. Uniquely, Exosphere can provide access to most research-focused cloud systems without custom integration work. The project seeks to increase the productivity of researchers and reduce the time to scientific discoveries. Exosphere achieves these goals by closing the gap between the power of cloud-enabled research techniques and their accessibility to researchers. Exosphere also enables computational literacy and workforce development with distributed workshops.
Investigators and community contributors build Exosphere with a fully public development process. They deliver the result as free and open-source software. This approach has made Exosphere the most widely-used interface for Jetstream2, a national-scale research cloud. It has also resulted in advanced features such as push-button elastic virtual clusters and reproducible data science workbenches. Exosphere can grow to serve use cases across the research community and beyond, as it is compatible with the OpenStack Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) used at hundreds of companies and not-for-profit organizations. A Phase I award from the Pathways for Enabling Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program enables Exosphere?s organizational and community development activities. These tasks include discovery of the user and contributor ecosystem via surveys and engagements at conferences, evaluating organization and governance models in collaboration with mentors, and developing a contributor engagement plan, user documentation, and a website. The successful result will be a fully-developed strategy to multiply and sustain the benefit of Exosphere to research computing and society at large.
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 POSE Phase I project advanced the open-source ecosystem for Exosphere, a user-friendly software interface for non-proprietary and research cloud computing systems. Exosphere provides a simple browser-based interface that makes the advanced capabilities of OpenStack-based clouds accessible to users without information technology administration backgrounds, including researchers and students. During the POSE award, the project team achieved key objectives in governance development, ecosystem discovery, and community growth. These efforts laid a robust foundation for sustaining Exosphere's impact and expanding it to new domains.
The most important objective was to evolve the Exosphere project's governance and decision-making processes. The team produced an interim document capturing our existing governance practices, then explored various governance models through interviews with collaborators and analyses of open-source software foundations. These included the Apache Software Foundation, Open Infrastructure Foundation, and Cloud-Native Computing Foundation. We then developed an organizational model scoring rubric, and collaborators independently ranked the options according to their expected fit for Exosphere's ecosystem. This culminated in transitioning the interim governance document into the Exosphere organization charter. We also created the Exosphere Foundation with Open Source Collective (OSC). OSC is a 501(c)(6) fiscal host that provides infrastructure for Exosphere to accept financial contributions and disburse them to software developers and other project contributors. Additional governance activities included completing a project sustainability plan, a plan to evolve Exosphere's continuous integration and deployment infrastructure, and a gap analysis of Exosphere against the passing-level criteria for the Open Source Software Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Best Practices. All of these materials are publicly accessible online.
The team also completed ecosystem discovery activities, including market analysis and a community survey. Using public data for 122 OpenStack deployments and survey results from 167 individuals, we produced a written strategy for ongoing ecosystem discovery, as well as a de-identified data set of survey responses. All of these are also publicly accessible online.
We also expanded our community-building activities. The team created a public website (https://exosphere.app) featuring documentation for onboarding new project contributors, a contributor skills matrix, and documentation for creating new Exosphere deployments. We also worked with a User Experience (UX) Designer to re-design the project home page, making it more approachable to a variety of stakeholders.
During the project period (September 2022 through August 2024), Exosphere's impact grew with its user base. On Jetstream2 alone, 2,314 unique individuals used Exosphere to create 24,972 compute instances. Exosphere had 15 source code contributors, 8 of whom contributed to the project for the first time. We also had over 13 non-code contributors who reported bugs, requested features, or performed non-coding tasks like feature testing and graphic design. The new Exosphere Foundation at Open Source Collective received $50,004 of contributions, and disbursed $21,100 to three software developers who contributed code to the project. Finally, at our community engagements, 14 participants joined our contributor onboarding workshop at OpenInfra Summit, 44 attendees joined our birds-of-a-feather session at PEARC23, and many community members visited us at the first United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) conference.
Last Modified: 10/01/2024
Modified by: Chris Martin
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