First Look Summary: What's Next for Campus Cyberinfrastructure?

In February 2009, a joint workshop of the EDUCAUSE Advanced Core Technologies Initiative (ACTI) Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group (ACTI-CCI) and the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) issued a report and recommendations that addressed the challenges and strategies for developing a coherent cyberinfrastructure from local campus to national facilities. The joint report asserted that extremely large clusters, such as those funded by federal agencies, will provide and support excellent scalability—but only for a relatively small number of computational scientists. The report noted the growing number of 1,000–2,000-core clusters on many campuses. The report concluded that it is not only practical but also optimal to address national cyberinfrastructure needs by the complementary, and even somewhat integrated, combination of campus and federal resources.

The joint report immediately preceded the formation of six task forces by the NSF-wide Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) that were charged with investigating long-term cyberinfrastructure issues. The ACCI Task Force members and participants at task-force-sponsored workshops included hundreds of representatives from the education and research community. The Task Forces actively solicited broad input to inform their work. In turn, institutions and individuals provided feedback and participated in the work of the Task Forces. Since the Task Forces’ final reports were published on April 1, 2011, they have been widely circulated and discussed at campuses and conferences.

ACTI-CCI plans to publish a broad-based response to the findings of the ACCI Task Forces from the campus perspective this June 2012. ACTI is comprised of 64 member institutions that include both higher education and regional networking organizations. Sixty-six representatives from 35 of these institutions serve on the Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group that is responsible for producing this work. With this white paper, ACTI-CCI aims to provide the higher education community with a thorough and thoughtful reflection upon each of the six reports and an analysis of the role of campus cyberinfrastructure in each of these areas. Therefore, specific recommendations for campus leaders are included in each section. ACTI-CCI also intends the analyses in this document to be of value to the ACCI and the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) as it administers the Cyberinfrastructure Framework for the 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) portfolio of programs.

The white paper includes six chapters that correspond to the six ACCI Task Force reports:

1. Grand Challenges
2. Campus Bridging
3. Cyberlearning and Workforce Development
4. Data and Visualization
5. High Performance Computing
6. Software for Science and Engineering

Each chapter has four components, including: a synopsis of the NSF ACCI Task Force report, a discussion of elements that warrant reinforcing from the campus perspective, a constructive critique of elements from the campus perspective, and a discussion of the implications of the report for the leadership of campus cyberinfrastructure.

In developing this white paper, ACTI-CCI has concluded that campus cyberinfrastructure cannot be ignored when planning and developing the national cyberinfrastructure because many of the underlying services and activities are campus-based. Some of the examples that are discussed in greater detail in the report include the following:

• Advances in cyberinfrastructure are often conceived and developed at campuses.
• Campuses train the next generation of cyberinfrastructure-ready investigators and update the skills of current researchers.
• Distributed grid environments draw upon campus computational resources, including cycles that would otherwise be lost.
• Campuses provide the champions who encourage the use of cyberinfrastructure, including outreach to new communities and disciplines.
• Campuses are multi-disciplinary environments that serve as a models for inter-disciplinary collaboration at the national level.
• Campuses have committed to the ongoing curation of numerous data sets and collections.
• Visualization requires resources provided by campuses.
• Campuses are indispensable partners in determining access control and trust relationships between researchers and national centers.
• Much research software, especially open source software, is written at campuses.

ACTI-CCI acknowledges the considerable efforts of the six NSF ACCI task forces and their volunteer members in developing the reports. The ACCI reports are valuable contributions to the national dialogue on developing a comprehensive plan for a national cyberinfrastructure that aids researchers in making wise and informed use of both federal and local resources. Higher education leaders are encouraged to appreciate the need for, and the value of investing in local cyberinfrastructure resources, not as an alternative but as a complement to federal initiatives. We hope that our feedback will help to further the dialogue as well as highlight the valuable role that campuses play in this space.