2019 NSF Workshop on Connecting Large Facilities and Cyberinfrastructure

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

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.