Cyberinfrastructure (CI) for NSF Large Facilities Workshop

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Many large experimental and observational facilities are deployed in diverse research fields from physics and materials science, to the biological sciences and geosciences, to astronomical science, ocean science, and engineering research. Large facilities engage in the collection, management and public distribution of massive scientific datasets that are expected remain be useful even beyond the lifetimes of the facilities themselves; and provide shared computational and analytic tools, as well as education and training related to these activities. Facility users also want to compare the large scale data to state-of-the-art simulations, which in turn can guide which future experiments to perform. To support these scientific missions and users, large facilities increasingly rely on national-scale cyberinfrastructure (CI), including high performance computing, advanced data platforms and analysis and visualization software infrastructure, and high-speed networking resources. There is increasing need for synergy between facilities and advanced CI resources, as emerging new technologies reshape the computational and data analysis environment and change the way scientific discovery is conducted. This project will support a two-day community workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for Large Facilities. The purpose of the workshop is to bring the members of both the facility and CI communities together, to consider the CI needs of facilities, explore how large facilities can collaborate better with developers of cyberinfrastructure to achieve their science missions and serve their users, exchange best practices and novel CI solutions, and start a planning process can lead to a sustainable resource and data ecosystem for large scale science that can respond to new emerging scientific needs and CI technologies. Desired outcomes also include inspiring new CI research and development activities that accelerate discovery across large scale science, and improving the connectedness of the national ecosystem of facilities and cyberinfrastructure in support of scientific discovery. This project was co-funded by several NSF directorates.