US and China Workshop Series to Build a Collaborative Frame-work for Developing Shared Software Infrastructure

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Software is critical for all branches of science and engineering and is a key component of the emerging global cyberinfrastructure. In parallel, science and engineering are becoming more collaborative, where multi-investigator teams with a diversity of expertise are required to efficiently attack increasingly complex fundamental questions and processes, on a global scale; including societal issues such as health, energy, weather, disaster mitigation (earthquake, flood), and the environment. Solving problems on a global scale requires both that scientists work together and that their software and related cyberinfrastructure interoperate. NSF recognizes the importance of the development of software and software institutes and has established a solicitation to provide opportunities for the U.S. research communities to their development. The National Natural Science Foundation of China similarly recognizes the significance of software development for science and engineering studies, and has supported research in this area, but there has been little communication between software research communities in the United States and China. This award will support a series of two workshops and intervening interactions by funding a group of approximately 15 U.S. researchers to interact with a similar number of researchers in the People?s Republic of China supported by the National Natural Science Foundation China, to explore three areas of software development: trusted software, extreme scale software, and architectures and processes for emerging infrastructure, in order to expand collaboration between the U.S. and China software researchers in these areas. The first workshop will be held in Beijing in Fall 2011; a second workshop will be held in San Diego in Spring 2012. Between the workshops small groups of participants and graduate students will meet to develop ideas from the first workshop, to be presented at the second workshop, and to be pursued after the end of this funded activity. The success of this activity will be measured in the research collaborations that persist beyond the framework of this activity. The intellectual merit of this activity is to determine through practice if this process can accelerate the formation of substantive, bi-lateral, peer-reviewed research programs. The broader impact will be to open the door, widely, to U.S.-China collaborations in some critical areas of software. The transformative impact will be a model of how other international research collaborations in cyberinfrastructure can be carried out to break down significant barriers between researchers in the world?s two largest economies.