Development of Cyberinfrastructure During Rapid and Interconnected Change

2. Development of Cyberinfrastructure During Rapid and Interconnected Change Dan Lubin Cyberinfrastructure Program Manager NSF Office of Polar Programs dlubin@nsf.gov Also thanks to Bill Wiseman Arctic Natural Sciences NSF Office of Polar Programs Arctic Forum 15 May 2008 Washington DC

3. How must research adapt to a rapidly changing Arctic? August 2004 August 1941 Muir and Riggs Glaciers, AK Courtesy Mark Parsons, NSIDC

4. Cyberinfrastructure becomes a critical consideration • Historical data in all forms must be preserved. • In a rapidly changing Arctic, data from past decades are a priceless benchmark. • We’re past IPCC 2007 Physical Science Basis. • On to assessment of ecological, human impacts, adaptation, • Increasing international collaboration. • Redouble climate observations for both physical and life sciences. • The physical, life science, and social science disciplines must be able to talk to each other! • Data of all types must be made interoperable across disciplines. • Large data sets such as satellite remote sensing and GCM model output must be accessible and interpretable across disciplines.

5. Cyberinfrastructure by Components Learning & Work Force Needs & Opportunities Virtual Organizations for Distributed Communities High Performance Computing Data Visualization & Interaction Courtesy Lucy Nowell, OCI

6. High Performance Computing Data, Data Analysis & Visualization Virtual Organizations Learning & Workforce Development Required Reading! Cyberinfrastructure Vision, March 2007 Available on NSF Office of Cyberinfrasturcture web site www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf0728/index.jsp

7. provides shared and connecting CI catalyzes Office of Cyberinfrastructure Cyberinfrastructure in Practice Courtesy Dan Atkins, OCI Director Provisioning -Creation, deploymentand operation of advanced CI Transformative Application - to enhance discovery & learning Borromean Ring: The three rings taken together are inseparable, but remove any one ring and the other two fall apart. See www.liv.ac.uk/~spmr02/rings/ R&D to enhance technical and social effectiveness of future CI environments

8. OCI Science Drivers apply directly to today’s Arctic climate change problems • Inherent complexity and multi-scale nature of todays frontier science challenges. • Requirement for multi-disciplinary, multi-investigator, multi-institutional approach (often international). • High data intensity from simulations, digital instruments, sensor nets, observatories. • Increased value of data and demand for data curation & preservation of access. • Exploiting infrastructure sharing to achieve better stewardship of research funding. • Strategic need for engaging more students in high quality, authentic science and engineering education. Dan Atkins, OCI Director

9. Emerging OCI Coordination Structure National Science & Technology Council (OSTP) Committee on Technology Subcommittee on Networking & IT R&D Other Federal Research & Mission Agency Programs Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure Liaison with each Directorate/Office CI COUNCIL Director Dep. Dir BIO CISE EHR ENG GEO MPS OISE OCI OPP SBE OCI ACCI Task Force Groups Inter Agency Data Group Directorate/Office CI Coordinators Committee International e-science, cyber science programs HPC Coordinating Group Data Coordinating Group Other Coordinating Groups TBD Dan Atkins, Director OCI Additional linkage within NSF through joint appointments and every OCI Program Officer having a liaison role with another Directorate or Office

10. High Performance Computing Track 1: One solicitation funded over 4 years: $200M acquisition + additional O&M cost. Track 2: Four solicitations over 4 years: $30M/yr acquisition + additional O&M cost. First track 1 approved 8-07 • TeraGrid • Large-scale operational CI for national open science community • 11 resource providers • 1 Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG) • Single unified allocation process • Comprehensive user support • Advanced applications & software integration • Science gateways • RS & Modeling: Don’t be afraid to check it out!

11. Drivers for OCI Data & Data Interoperability Strategy • Increased scale & heterogeneity of Data • Demand for federation & semantic interoperability • Increased expectations for sharing & openness • More systematic quality control & long-term access Lucy Nowell, OCI Examples from CADIS (AON Program)

12. Federal Agencies, Academia, Library & Preservation Sector, Foundations & Non-profits, Commercial Sector, National Laboratories, International Agencies OCI Data Strategy Mechanisms DATANET Partners Exec-level Review of NSF Data Policies Blue Ribbon task force on sustainable data repositories Activities Lucy Nowell, OCI

13. ST-SP P: Physical mtgs I: Print-on-paper books, journals F: Physical labs, studios, shops DT-SP P: Shared notebook I: Library reserves F: Time-shared physical labs, ... ST-DP P: AV conference I: Web search F: Online instruments DT-DP P: Email I: Knowbots F: Autonomous observatories Virtual Organizations offer additional modes of interaction between People, Information, and Facilities Courtesy Diana Rhoten, OCI Time Same (synchronous) Different (asynchronous) Same Geographic Place Different P: people, I: information, F: facilities, instruments

14. Virtual Organization Examples • NanoHUB (www.nanohub.org) • Serving the nanotechnology community • One of the most successful sets of VO portal software, now spinning of as HUBzero (www.hubzero.org) • National Ecological Observatory Network (www.neoninc.org) • Continental-scale research platform investigating impacts of climate change, land use change, and invasive species on ecology • Network for Earthquake Engineering Cyberinfrastructure Center (NEESgrid) (http://it.nees.org) • Real-time access to remote experiments in earthquake engineering • Arctic Observation Network (www.eol.ucar.edu/projects/aon-cadis/) • Instrument deployment underway • Cooperative Arctic Data and Information Service (CADIS) evolving, very promising

15. Cyberinfrastructure considerations lead to philosophical considerations • Data interoperability and virtual organizations require consideration of ontologies, semantics and provenance. • Data Product Suites versus Observation Suites • “Place-based” observations (e.g., LTER model) versus Large-scale observations (e.g.,NEON model) • Is your science plan capability based (What can we do?) or requirements based (What should be done?), and is this choice appropriate? • Does your plan for measuring climate and ecological forcings contain built-in assumptions about which are most important? • Rigorous consideration of CI requirements will compel you to answer these questions!

16. Requirements for Success with OCI Solicitations • Domain Science (everything we do) must have an equal partnership with Computer Science. • Computer Science must not appear to be the servant of the Domain Science. • If you do anything polar – you are a domain scientist! • OCI panels tend to be heavily weighted by computer scientists’ input! • Not always by number, sometimes by unique expertise, strong personalities! • You should have a bona fide computer scientist as a collaborator. • Computer scientist, informatician, sociologist, etc., depending on solicitation. • Someone actively publishing in the area of his/her contribution. • Involve, or (even better) potential to publish: research in top-flight computer or information science peer-review journals. • Computer trade journals, software manuals, not sufficient for your reference list! • Your work/management plan must clearly discuss everyone’s role, even on a 5-page preproposal. A “token” computer scientist, or name dropping, won’t fly! • Broader Impacts must be robust and credible, not boilerplate! • Challenge: Panels are multidisciplinary, highly competitive – you must engage the reviewers and keep them excited about your work! • Positive: Great interest in global climate change issues throughout OCI!

17. Proposal versus Preproposal • Preparing a Proposal • You take lots of long walks. • You write the best 15 pages you can, finishing a draft at least several days before the deadline. • You do a lot of proofreading, editing, and polishing before submitting the proposal. • You can count on ~10 minutes of discussion about your proposal in the NSF panel. • Preparing a Preproposal • You need to take just as many long walks. • You only need to write 5 pages, but you need to engage the reviewers, convince them that your project is worth doing and will break new ground. • Convince reviewers that your team is well constituted. • Convince reviewers that details of methods and literature survey will follow in the full proposal. • You do just as much proofreading, editing, and polishing before submitting the preproposal. • You can count on ~5 minutes of discussion in the NSF panel.

18. Cyberinfrastructure and OPP • OCI will very likely set the standard for future OPP investments in data management and interoperability, cyber-enabled collaboration, and other requirements for computational resources. • Most of the OCI solicitations lend themselves very well to polar concerns. Do consider submitting proposals! • There has already been good interest in OCI proposal submission by polar researchers earlier this year. Can we keep it up next year? • Polar Researchers: I’m on your side! (dlubin@nsf.gov, 703-292-7416)