NSF ACCI (Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure) Taskforce Update - CASC Meeting 23 March 2010

Craig Stewart – stewart@iu.eduExecutive Director, Pervasive Technology

InstituteAssociate Dean, Research Technologies

Indiana University

The Taskforces

• Campus Bridging • Data • Grand Challenge Task Force • High Performance Computing • Software and Tools • Workforce Development

Topic areas for Campus Bridging• Campuses are the fundamental organizing principle and they are

not going to go away …… campuses are where the vast majority of the implementation of campus research CI and campus bridging technologies will occur.

• The large majority of the nation’s CI resources are paid for by entities other than federal funding agencies.

• What recommendations can we make to campuses to optimize the nation’s CI resources and their use in science and engineering? What can the NSF do to incent campuses?

• Visualization and library-based IT is primarily within the scope of the Data taskforce

• Focus on practical recommendations for the next 1-3 years but also looking far enough ahead in time.

Identity Management

• Shibboleth• Working on plan to create a ‘cookbook’ for

campuses and for service providers• Technical risk assessment (brief)• Web access• Unix prompt access (even if ugly)

Data-centric Campus Bridging Issues (Guy Almes, lead)

• Networking design within campus and how it interacts with national trends, international trends (including technology trends of different scaling rates for different areas of technology).

• How can the end-to-end network architecture meet the needs (including data access and remote visualization) stemming from Campus Bridging?

• From a researcher’s standpoint, how do I access and manage my data (not necessarily knowing where my data are)

• Data storage infrastructure - what are the expectations on campuses? Issues of reliability and data management

• Not in scope: Ontologies, Provenance, Specifics of workflows

Networking (Dave Jent, lead)• Find best practices where campus networking is done well • From the campus perspective: how to identify best practices in campus

networking and end-to-end computing architecture (where that may mean lab to campus to RON to national backbone to resource hanging off of national backbones)

• Can we also identify best practices in avoiding (or safely sitting outside) campus CI when campus cybersecurity policiesconflict with research needs

• How do you design a network for researchers when you are designing overall for the masses or for campus business operations? How can you solve networking bottlenecks in a targeted way?

• What is the role of IPv6, wireless?• Objective: create a document describing the minimal networking

facilities to support research within campus and from campus to RON to national backbone networking

Workshop on networking and data bridging issues!

• http://ndcampusbridging.iu-pti.org/• April 8-9 in scenic Indianapolis• Registration, call for white papers• Everyone has workshop fatigue but …

Middleware (Andrew Grimshaw and John McGee, co-leads)

• Goal: Eliminate distinction between resources - providing simple end-to-end intuitive interfaces

• Goal: Can we make a recommendation about best practices in middleware that (while recognizing our software is not good enough) do not require that the first step in making things better is not rebuilding everything from scratch?

• Goal: make a small set of useful reference implementations of software stacks

• Recommendation: NSF should create Advisory board on state cyberinfrastructure - to make recommendations on State CI, particularly targeted at EPSCOR states and smaller campuses more generally where appropriate

Grand Challenge and VO workshop 22-23 April

• The GCC's and VO's Taskforce is planning on holding a two-day workshop in Arlington VA. on April 22-23. Initially we though that inviting all of the the TF leads and liaisons plus the wider community would result in a group of participants that would easily exceed the capacity of the meeting room (~100). However, to date responses have been very slow in coming in …

• Draft of report to be available soon

CyberInfrastructure Framework 21

• High end computational, data, visualization and sensor-based systems and the associated user support needed for transformative science;

• Activities that link cyberinfrastructure framework into campuses (including government and business) and programs that provide the widely dispersed, most broadly based activities and resources…

• Major national and international research facilities and collaborations

• A comprehensive plan for education and outreach in computational science to support learning and workforce development for 21st century science and engineering.

Contact points• Campus Bridging - Craig Stewart, Chair, stewart@indiana.edu, Jim Bottum,

Co-Chair, jb@clemson.edu. Campus bridging reps will be attending Campus CI days in listening mode.

• Data - Shenda Baker, Chair, shenda_baker@hmc.edu • Grand Challenge Communities and Virtual Organizations - J. Tinsley Oden,

Chair, oden@ices.utexas.edu, John King, Co-Chair, jlking@umich.edu• High Performance Computing - Thomas Zacharia, Chair,

thomas.zacharia@tennessee.edu, Jim Kinter, Co-Chair, kinter@cola.iges.org• Software and Tools - David Keyes, Chair, kd2112@columbia.edu, Valerie

Taylor, Co-Chair, taylor@cse.tamu.edu• Learning and Work Force Development - Alex Ramirez, Chair,

aramirez@hacu.net• Useful web sites

– https://nsf.sharepointspace.com/acci_public/default.aspx– www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10015/nsf10015.pdf

A request for help on a different matter

• Industrial outreach program questions from IU MSIS students