Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, illustrates the types of facilities and services to be provided in an integrated way by a cyberinfrastructure layer.

Community-Specific Knowledge Environments for Research and Education (collaboratory, co-laboratory, grid community, e-science community, virtual community)

Customization for discipline-and project-specific applications

High performance computation services Data, information, knowledge management services Observation, measurement fabrication services Interfaces, visualization services Collaboration services

Networking, Operating Systems, Middleware

Base Technology: computation, storage, communication

Grey area indicates cyberinfrastructure: hardware, software, services, personnel, organizations

Figure 2.1 Integrated cyberinfrastructure services to enable new knowledge environments for research and education

Why does the University need it and what difference will it make?

A Requirement for Research

Researchers routinely use information technology in their research.  Whether in science, engineering, liberal arts, business or any other discipline, they expect to have easy access to the Cyberinfrastructure resources they need and certain faculty, along with their funded research, will go where that access is available.

A competitive edge

The institution’s Cyberinfrastructure can be a differentiating factor in getting the grants that help new faculty be successful and fund their research. Researchers who have resources to share, including systems, instruments, observatories and skilled support staff, have an advantage in collaborative research opportunities offered by funding agencies.  This benefits the institution with increased patents and the ability to attract high quality graduate and undergraduate students.

A Requirement to participate in national and global efforts

The University needs to adapt a strategy for Cyberinfrastructure in order to be a player in solving national and global priorities such as understanding global climate change, protecting our natural environment, applying genomics-proteomics to human health, maintaining national security, mastering the world of nanotechnology, and predicting and protecting against natural and human disasters, as well as to address some of our most fundamental intellectual questions such as the formation of the universe and the fundamental character of matter.

Essential to address important trends

From day to day, the technology is even more embedded in solutions, development and research involving most of areas of knowledge and science. It has changed the way of studying, researching and teaching. Some of the most important trends in research under the technology and cyberinfrastructure influence can be mentioned as:

• Multi-disciplinary research:  Multidisciplinary research is moving beyond more common collaborations between different areas of science toward collaboration with arts and humanities in areas such as visual studies. Another rapidly growing area is medicine and science in an effort to move science to “bedside” more effectively. These collaborations will require convergent technology in the area of media - data, voice and video, as well as large computational resources and collaborative applications to allow orchestration of experiments on a global scale.
• Multi-institutional research: The technology has enabled cooperation among researchers from different institutes, different cities, countries and continents, making use of audio-conference, videoconference, chat, and e-mail as communication channels. (E.g. CA-BIG, BIRN, High Energy Physics)
• Collaborative research: Cyberinfrastructure that supports multiple types of communication channels crosses international boundaries, unlimited by place or language.
• Advanced modeling and simulations:  Increased cyberinfrastructure processing and storage capacities at lower costs, enable the creation of more complex and realistic models and simulations to mimic real world experience and projections.  
• Large amount of data: The ability to store, search and manipulate data for analysis and synthesis originated from even more complex processes and models is enabled through large scale storage and advanced processing Cyberinfrastructure.
• Business uses of Cyberinfrastructure:  Technology is part of the solution for health, engineering, architecture, banking, education and many other branches of knowledge. One example is Electronic Patient Records – in which Cyberinfrastructure is part of the solution for mobility and pervasive environment in hospitals - information about patients everywhere and any time by doctors.
• Security and privacy:  Even though the use of information technology is pervasive, people expect personal, research and business information to be securely managed with appropriate privacy upheld.  Security and privacy considerations must be considered in all stages of planning for and implementing Cyberinfrastructure, including policy development and middleware implementation.

Most researchers use Cyberinfrastructure in some aspects of their research (computation, data gathering, publishing)

Additional notes:

• Cyberinfrastructure skills (such as ability to execute code at national centers) are becoming required skills for researchers at our institutions working on certain types of problems.  The availability of skilled support staff would release researchers to spend more of their time in research and to efficiently share that knowledge in support of other researchers.
• For many higher education institutions, there may be limited planning or oversight of how research-specific IT support is managed. Some Cyberinfrastructure components (clusters, high performance computers, optical networks) are expensive and need continuous replacement. There is an opportunity to improve efficiency, reduce costs and improve data security through a well- planned Cyberinfrastructure.  Some early implementers (Indiana, Purdue, UT Austin) have benefited greatly from investment in Cyberinfrastructure 

Where can it be applied at the university?

Planning

Beginning with an inclusive planning effort, each university will need to decide where it will apply its investment to best position itself. Areas to include in the planning include: 

• Central IT (optical networks, shared clusters, datacenter facilities, storage, backup facilities, etc.)

• Libraries (research data repositories, data archival, publications, etc.)

• Research facilities or research centers (visualization walls, specialized equipment, etc.)

• Departments throughout the campus (the arts, humanities, medicine, science and engineering.

• Research support staff (user support, help with optimizing code, help connecting researchers to the correct local or national resources, data storage, etc.)

Broad scope

In general most disciplines can benefit from enhancements to security, data classification, data repositories and ease of publication.  These programs should include Humanities and Social Sciences. Additionally Cyberinfrastructure can be beneficial in

• New faculty outreach
• Pre-proposal consultation and standardized content
• Templates and boilerplate for proposals
• Forum for departmental IT staff currently in support of research
• Matching grants / incentive funding
• Alignment
• Libraries
• Campus centers
• College, department and lab service centers

High End computing

Many areas will benefit from the high performance computing and optical networks aspects of the Cyberinfrastructure.  These areas include:

• Physics,
• Chemistry
• Astronomy
• Mathematics
• Bioinformatics
• Social Sciences

How can it be implemented?

View through Three Lenses

Each institution’s implementation will be different but strategic planning is the key to a successful implementation. Each institution needs to look through three lenses during this planning exercise: disciplines, technology and culture.

• The discipline lens allows the institution to decide which disciplines should be the primary beneficiaries of institutional Cyberinfrastructure investment. These could be core institutional strengths or perhaps new areas that the institution may want to develop.
• The technology lens allows the institution to evaluate the current and future states of the technology in support of these disciplines. It is possible that an institution may want establish a particle physics department but the supporting technology may be too cost prohibitive or a better solution may be giving researchers access to existing national resources.
• Finally the culture lens should allow for a frank conversation about what types of changes the institution can embrace and what risks it can take with its investment. To move through this process efficiently the common steps are:

Identify key scholars

Identify and engage key scholars and make sure that they remain involved. A good way to keep them involved is participation in a committee that acts as a governing or advisory body for campus Cyberinfrastructure development.

Incorporate into Strategic planning

Developing your campus’s Cyberinfrastructure is a strategic activity and should be a part of both institutional and IT strategic planning.  Below are some ideas to get you started (for more ideas see the Indiana University Strategic plan in resource section below):

• Identify and specify the computing needs of the research community.
• Identify the weakness and the threats faced by the university and its research community due to the lack of such computing resources.
• Identify the trends in terms of HPC and Cyberinfrastructure in the most important research communities around the world.
• Identify the computing resources types (e.g., computational resources, networks) necessary to fulfill the demand from the research community.
• Specify the research projects to be enabled by the acquisition of such computing resources, their expected results, the challenges to be faced, the direct and side benefits to be obtained for the research community, the university, the local industry and the society as whole.
• Identify the potential funding sources.
• Identify the potential solution providers.
• Specify how this strategic plan will be communicated to the leaders of the university, the funding agencies and the potential sponsor

Create a Vision

Part of your strategic planning will be the development of a vision.  Russ Hobby, Internet2, spoke of a vision for Cyberinfrastructure that a university may consider: 

• Computation and Storage to easily allow transition from the desktop, to the campus resource, to the regional center, to national supercomputing centers using the same software.
• Data repositories in formats and locations to allow ease of sharing, indexing and searching among all interested disciplines (the real digital library!)
• Tools to allow people to easily construct systems to analyze, visualize, and simulate their research subjects.
• Collaboration tools that allow people to work across institutional and international boundaries.

[Reference is Russ Hobby, Internet2 “Cyberinfrastructure Days Planning Your Campus Cyberinfrastructure Strategy”, ND/SD EPSCoR 6th Biennial Joint Conference 7 September 2007.]

Address funding

How Cyberinfrastructure development is funded is an important issue to address. Most of the time it should be shared/hybrid model (some central, some departmental/collegiate, some grant funding). Larger resources (datacenters, supercomputers, massive storage/backup...) should be managed centrally with most (some) of the costs underwritten by central funds.

Identify Low Hanging Fruit

Often central IT units offer services that are underutilized by researchers. Gather and list things central IT already does that can be categorized as research support & services, or things that exist that can be leveraged. This list can be used for marketing planning and execution.

• Start with a nucleus of a services/capabilities portfolio
• Networking services
• Campus needs and tools
• Regional/national needs
• Software licensing services for research software
• Data repository support for researchers
• Internet2 Research Channel services (http://www.researchchannel.org/)

 Review of Campus Technology Needs

There are a number of technical areas to consider depending on the needs of the researchers on your campus.  These include:

• Identity management services
• Shibboleth - federated identify management service as underpinning to Virtual Organizations and other services
• Provide logins that can be carried through to other institutions
• Attribute delivery services
• Virtual Organizations / Virtual Research Environments
• VOs are organized around a research project
• They need to manage access to resources (computing power, instruments, data storage) for members of the VOs
• Campus could host VOs services or enable access to VO services on other campuses (e.g., myVOCS from U Alabama Birmingham)
• Simplify access to Grid workflow and resources such as Teragrid (jobs that spawn other jobs across the Grid)
• Collaboration tools and workspaces
• Possibly implement and support Sakai or other open source application features for Research Collaboration. Campus licensing agreements are often too restrictive for inter-institutional collaboration.
• Expand other collaboration tools such as Wikis
• Provide stable and secure collaboration tools that can be easily shared so others do not need a new login
• Library and repository services
• Consider "Researcher Pages" or "Institutional Bibliography" functionality with the institutional repository
• Consider Linking research papers to the research datasets upon which they were based
• Create an over-arching search interface to all Library research resources
• Assess and implement support for Electronic Data repositories for researchers
• Support for research administrative tools
• Implement a "PI Portal" that would give researchers access to information they need for their work such as consolidated grant and funding information
• A digital grants dashboard application - My Grants at a Glance
• My Advisees/Dissertators/Grad Students at a Glance
• Network-related services
• Direct IP connectivity to shared scientific devices - sensor arrays, medical devices, telescopes, etc
• Expand wireless for colleagues coming to campus to collaborate
• Consulting service and process for researchers to request and obtain special networking connectivity services

The authors recognize that in the paragraphs above is more than enough for a five minute conversation. However, a generic five-minute conversation would not be effective. We hope that the reader will select a few areas that are especially pertinent to their school and highlights them in their five-minute conversation. The authors also hope that the included biography will provide the reader with additional resources and ideas from other institutions.

Bibliography

Case Studies from other institutions published by ECAR:

“Collaborative Support Model for Research at Georgetown University” (Judith A. Pirani and Donald Z. Spicer)

“Supporting Research Computing Through Collaboration at Princeton University” (Judith A. Pirani, Donald Z. Spicer and Ronald Yanosky)

“A New Model for Supporting Research at Purdue University” (Donald Spicer and Bruce Metz)

Net@Edu CyberInfrastructure main page

http://www.educause.edu/CyberinfrastructureResources/11475

Proceedings from CIO CyberInfrastructure Summit 2007

http://www.educause.edu/cisummit

Proceedings from a workshop at SAC 2006

http://www.educause.edu/NMM061

ELI resources

7 Things You Should Know About Cyberinfrastructure

http://connect.educause.edu/library/abstract/7ThingsYouShouldKnow/44951

ECAR Key Findings:

“IT Engagement in Research a Baseline Study – Key findings” (Harvey Blustain, Sandra Braman, Richard N. Kantz, and Gail Salaway)

ECAR Roadmaps:

“IT Engagement in Research a Baseline Study Roadmap” (Harvey Blustain, Sandra Braman, Richard N. Kantz, and Gail Salaway)

 “What do Researchers need? Higher Education IT from the Researcher’s Perspective” (Sandra Braman)

ECAR Survey Instruments:

“IT Engagement in research at Medical Schools and Colleges”

“Calit2: A Case Study in a Next-Generation Research Environment” (Donald Spicer and Bruce Metz)

Educause Connect Podcasts

Cliff Lynch’s presentation to EDUCAUSE (Net@EDU 2007) - The Institutional Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and E-Research

http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/podcasttheinstitutio/44963

ELI Web Seminars

“Cyberinfrastructure: A Campus Perspective on What It Is and Why You Should Care” with Pete Siegel

http://www.educause.edu/LIVE0715

“Teaching and Learning via Cyberinfrastructure” with Chris Dede

http://www.educause.edu/ELIWEB0611

Other resources:

IU Scholar Works:

“Final Report of the Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure Research Taskforce” (Wheeler, Bradley and McRobbie, Michael)

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/469

ACLS “Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences” http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/

NSF Cyberinfrasrtucure vision document

www.nsf.gov/attachments/102806/public/NSFCyberinfrastructureVisionDraft-4.0.pdf

Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure:  Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, January 2003, Dan Atkins, Chair.

http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/CH2.pdf

Internet 2

A Workshop on Effective Approaches to Campus Research Computing Cyberinfrastructure

http://middleware.internet2.edu/crcc/