Appendix 3: Feedback from National CI Experts Panel
Invited speakers from outside Clemson were asked after the May 19-21, 2008 CI Days to reflect upon the experience and provide feedback about the University and its Cyberinfrastructure initiatives. As detailed below, their comments reflect a very positive experience at the event –two described it as “inspiring” – combined with admiration for the University’s progress in developing both advanced technology and a broad constituency for Cyberinfrastructure in support of research, instruction, and outreach. The external experts offered numerous suggestions for leveraging Clemson’s energetic CI posture, maintaining and accelerating momentum, and exploring collaborations at the campus, state, regional, and national levels.
Post-event Email Survey Questions
1. Overall impressions of Clemson?
2. Overall impressions of the workshop? Follow-up advice?
3. Do you see any opportunities / differentiators / areas of strength that Clemson could leverage?
4. Did you identify or make connections with Clemson people while you were here that might lead to additional collaboration / service with your organizations or with specific people you have met at other higher educational institutions.
5. General impressions of the break out sessions?
6. How do our successes, our challenges and our ideas about the future compare to other higher education institutions?
7. Any other comments you care to make?
National Cyberinfrastructure Experts Panel
• Mark Lundstrom - Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University; founding director of the National Science Foundation’s Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN)
• Ann Doyle - Director of Arts and Humanities Initiatives, Internet2
• Russ Hobby - Cyberinfrastructure Program Architect, University of California, Davis, on assignment as Program Manager, Internet2
• Patrick Dreher - Director of Advanced Computing Infrastructure and Systems, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Chapel Hill, NC; Research Scientist, Laboratory for Nuclear Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Co-chair, Educause Net@edu Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group
• Scott Lathrop - TeraGrid Director of Education, Outreach and Training (EOT) at the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory
• Ronald R. “Ron” Hutchins - Associate Vice Provost for Research and Technology and Chief Technology Officer, Office of Information Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology; Vice chair, Southern Light Rail (SLR); Board member, National LambdaRail (NLR); Technical lead, Southern Crossroads (SoX)
1. Overall impressions of Clemson?
• Mark L - Very positive. It was my first visit, and I was impressed with the people and facilities.
• Ann D - I was impressed with the level of faculty engagement and interest, and very impressed with the faculty/student ratio and beautiful campus.
• Russ H - Clemson seems to be a great university that the rest of the country is not too aware of, but with events like these that is changing. Researchers seem enthusiastic and see the event as a way to learn from each other and explore new ways to work together.
I see a lot of similarities with UC-Davis, another university with a strong Agriculture School. Maybe you and UC-Davis CIO Pete Siegel should have the campuses work closer together as "sister universities.” (BTW, I got a Clemson sweatshirt at the bookstore and my daughter has been wearing it every day since I came home. She likes the orange!)
• Pat D - Clemson is a solid university with an enthusiastic faculty who are anxious to participate in the Cyberinfrastructure capabilities and opportunities there
• Scott L - The campus seems well positioned for the faculty, staff and students to work together to advance the use of CI to meet the already known applications needs across the campus. Administrative leadership and support is excellent. The campus cyberinfrastructure has been significantly advanced in a short period of time, with more enhancements already in the works. The faculty and staff have many good ideas for accelerate further change and improvement in both research and education.
• Ron H - My overall impression is very positive. It was truly amazing to me that so many faculty members attended the sessions and participated in presentations. The fact that the presenters were from such a diverse set of disciplines is a valuable thing.
2. Overall impressions of the workshop? Follow-up advice?
• Mark L - I enjoyed it greatly – especially the opportunity to hear from the liberal arts side of campus, which I rarely have an opportunity to do. The turn out was impressive – especially after the end of the semester.
• Ann D - Amazing campus turnout; very well organized; great roster of panelists. I would support, in whatever way possible, departmental or school/college follow up meetings to take advantage of the momentum generated by the event.
• Russ H - Great attendance! Hallway and break conversations seemed to be quite fruitful. So many stayed to the very end.
On follow-up, the challenge will be to maintain momentum. You got the people started looking at the CI-Days web page. You need to maintain that or something similar with updates and new information. Maybe a monthly newsletter on the web page with an article on how a researcher is using CI would be helpful. You could occasionally have the featured researcher do a seminar on their use of CI. A monthly email reminder could outline the highlights.
Think about ways to keep the researchers involved in CI planning. Advisory groups help to have the researchers as part of that planning. Let the research community know about the current issues you are dealing with and your thoughts on how they might be solved. That makes them feel that they are part of the solution and less likely to complain later. The communications channels above can help with this.
• Pat D - The workshop was excellent. Very well organized and planned. I particularly liked the evening reception. Having a poster session at the reception was an excellent idea. The reception allowed everyone to mingle and talk. It also provided a forum for students and researchers to present their work to a wide audience in a relaxed atmosphere. I was not aware of the wide spectrum of Cyberinfrastructure activities and projects at Clemson. From talking to the many presenters at the reception, I came to have an even better appreciation of the strength an depth of the Clemson program. (From speaking to some Clemson people, they too did not appreciate the breadth and depth of the ongoing research projects and activities either until they attended the poster session.) This forum also allowed students to present their work and to interact with many senior people in the field. For me, this poster session is the reality check to all of the Cyberinfrastructure efforts and discussions and demonstrated – in action, that Clemson is a strong an vibrant university capitalizing on Cyberinfrastructure to build a strong educational and research program.
• Scott L - This was a very well organized and a very well attended event. It is a model for other campus CI Days events.
The most important and challenging follow-up advice is to sustain the interest. The seed grants will be key to helping foster innovative ideas. Nurturing successful projects towards securing larger scale funding will be critical to realizing the campus goals and project goals.
The fostering of on-going information sharing and collaboration is an important component that will require a commitment of time and effort. There should be more opportunities (in person and on-line) for faculty to share outcomes as well as ideas for further innovation in research and education.
• Ron H – I thought the workshop was a powerful way to get information into the hands of faculty and to get visibility for Clemson into the external world! I guess the proof will be in how many of the folks who attended participate in the possibilities in the future.
Follow up in the same manner as initial contact with them is probably key. Taking success stories to these folks to challenge them to participate will help.
3. Do you see opportunities / differentiators / areas of strength that Clemson could leverage?
• Mark L - Your people in the humanities have some interesting ideas and seem to have realized the opportunity of CI early.
• Ann D - Your comment that Clemson operations are fairly informal and not terribly bureaucratic is, in my opinion/experience, a strong indicator for success in making projects and activities flourish and thrive. There are so many components and varying expertise that are needed to fully engage in the world of cyberinfrastructure, that highly stove-piped organizations often can't easily pull together the right teams to succeed. I left feeling really positive about Clemson's capacity to make traction on your goals.
• Russ H - Clemson seems to be a very people oriented campus. Build on that. The follow-up advice above took that into account. Clemson being an agriculture-oriented school can use CI to support those activities. Explore use CI in outreach to the agricultural industry and to other ag schools
• Pat D - Opportunities for collaboration with local industries. Several strong ties to industry could be cultivated.
• Scott L - As an EPSCoR institution, Clemson is in a unique position to lead a state-wide initiative to foster state-wide collaboration and bring significantly more research funding into the state and into the campus. The combination of administrative support and industrial support will be strengths in a proposal to the EPSCoR program.
• Ron H - I think you've already identified these areas based on the presenters and presentations. Clearly low hanging fruit exists around bio applications and HPC connections. Others may include some of the "Hollywood" functions; the stories and videos are powerful expositions of talent.
4. Did you identify or make connections with Clemson people while you were here that might lead to additional collaboration / service with your organizations or with specific people you have met at other higher educational institutions.
• Ann D - Yes; I plan to follow up with both Barbara Weaver, in CCIT, and Chip Egan.
• Russ H - One researcher was talking about putting Wi-Fi collars on elephants in India so that the villages would know when the elephants were coming. ;-) More seriously with networking in mind, I did talk to some researchers that had concerns about network performance. Setting appropriate expectations on what can be achieved over the network can help in the designs of applications. When reasonable network performance is not achieved, the researcher should know that help is available to figure out why. It is often not a problem in the network when poor network performance is observed. Internet2 can help with tools to identify performance problems.
I noted issues of data management seemed to come up a lot. Formatting of data for ease of sharing. Sharing mechanisms, backup and archiving were concerns. Cliff Lynch would be the obvious one to expound on these though.
• Scott L - A number of Clemson researchers are well poised to take advantage of the available computing resources provided by TeraGrid. Clemson staff can further broaden awareness of the national resources as members of the TeraGrid Campus Champions program to keep informed of national resources and services.
There were a number of discussions about how Clemson staff and researchers can benefit from the use of TeraGrid resources and collaborations with TeraGrid Resource Providers. Clemson staff will benefit from on-going discussions with the following TeraGrid Working Groups:
~ Meta-scheduling and co-scheduling – contact Kelly Gaither at Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin
~ Allocations mechanisms – contact Dave Hart at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
~ Education and training activities – contact Scott Lathrop at University of Chicago / Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
~ Campus Champions – contact Kay Hunt at Purdue
~ TeraGrid Pathways – contact Laura McGinnis at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)
~ Visualization – contact Kelly Gaither at TACC
~ User Services – contact Sergiu Sanielevici at PSC
~ Supercoputing Education Program – contact Paul Gray about SC08 (November in Austin), and Charlie Peck about SC09
• Ron H - I already had connections with Clemson, but the time there for the workshop solidified the connections and brought new ideas to the table for these relationships.
5. General impressions of the break out sessions?
• Ann D - I was only able to attend the main sessions due to my travel schedule, but I found the reception very helpful for having follow up conversations with other panelists and faculty
• Russ H - Good conversations. The key will be to keep those conversations going. Provide opportunities to allow that to happen.
• Pat D - I felt they were very useful for the Clemson community itself as an information and idea forum
• Scott L - The group had a lot of ideas and suggestions – some are attainable in the short term, while others will require significant planning and resources. It is hoped that good notes were taken, action items were assigned, and a report back to the members will follow, along with next steps.
The recurring theme was that people were just starting to understand the broad range of needs, interests, and resources already in place. More communications among the campus was seen as important to the process. Follow-up campus meetings to foster this on-going dialogue would be useful.
• Ron H – I was not able to attend breakout sessions.
6. How do our successes, our challenges and our ideas about the future compare to other higher education institutions?
• Mark L - The fact that you are making plans, puts you in a small group of universities that recognize that CI will change universities and the it's best to drive those changes rather than adapt to them.
• Ann D - Your goals for Clemson are in keeping with many campuses and more aggressive than many others. I think with strong leadership and a "make it happen" culture, you are well-positioned to take a leadership role.
• Russ H - I think that the challenges are similar to other universities. Clemson is ahead of many of those on the CI front. Because of this, Clemson can serve as an example of how CI can be done. I have talked about using Clemson's planning of the CI Days event as a cookbook for other campuses. This can extend to other aspects of CI. What Clemson has done with research computing can serve as one model of how campuses can deal with this issue. Collecting these models would seem appropriate for the Educause Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group.
• Pat D - Clemson faces challenges similar to many other universities. The biggest assets are the support of the Provost and an excellent IT staff
• Scott L - The challenges and ideas are similar to those occurring on other campuses. The potential for success at Clemson seems quite high as resources seem to be attainable once a clear plan for action is articulated.
The overall campus commitment among the administration is to be credited for the rapid advancements in the current infrastructure, for making the CI Days event happen, for fostering seed grants, and for nurturing innovation that will sustain the interest and the momentum. The high-level administrative support provides a clear advantage for enhancing research and education at Clemson. The seed grants that are chosen should be nurtured, and then showcased, in order to expand this program to support innovative ideas to take root.
• Ron H - It appears Clemson is ahead in some of the operational challenges in networking and commodity computing compared to others. The challenges that still exist I believe are similar across most of the top tier of higher education: funding, security, maintaining the interest and participation of faculty to name a few. Clemson is in a good position to partner in the Southeast to strengthen the region. I hope we can continue down that path.
7. Any other comments you care to make?
• Mark - Thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed the meeting. It was also great to see how well my former Purdue colleagues (Jim,B, Krishna M, and Sebastien G) are doing.
• Ann D - Thanks for including me in what turned out to be an inspiring event.
• Russ H - The comments above are probably pretty obvious, but you asked. ;-)
• Scott L - Congratulations on this campus-wide event. Do not hesitate to let us know how we can assist as the campus moves ahead with its CI plans.
• Ron H – Again, thank you for the invitation and opportunity to participate in this workshop. It was truly inspiring to see what's going on at Clemson. Let me know if there are other opportunities for us to work together.
