Harnessing Complexity in High Performance Computing Ecosystems: A Complex Adaptive Systems Framework

The use of high performance computing (HPC) has been generating influential scientific breakthroughs since the twentieth century. Yet there have been few studies of the complex socio-technical systems formed by these supercomputers and the humans who operate and use them. In this paper, we describe the first complex adaptive systems (CAS) analysis of the dynamics of HPC ecosystems. We conducted an 18-month ethnographic study that included scientific collaborations that use an HPC research center and examined the processes in HPC socio-technical systems via CAS theory to devise organizational designs and strategies that take advantage of system complexity. We uncovered several significant mismatches in the variation and adaptation processes within subsystems and conclude with three potential design directions for management and organization of HPC socio-technical ecosystems

Rhythms of information infrastructure cultivation: the case of e-Mobility in Berlin

This thesis investigates the importance of temporal rhythms in the study of information infrastructures (IIs), responding to the call to address an II’s “biography” by focusing on its evolution over time. It enriches understanding of how socially constructed rhythms, a temporal structure under-examined in the II literature, influence II cultivation. A strategic niche project to develop an e-mobility II in Berlin is used as the case study and reveals the influence of rhythm in disciplining (constraining) and modeling (motivating) II cultivation. It demonstrates how the intermediary may mediate these influences through the interventions of harmonising, riffing and composing. Based on these interventions, the study develops the concept of facilitated II cultivation, which adds to the emergent literature exploring the tension between planned and emergent infrastructure work. In doing so, the study presents a framework that helps combine short-term implementation concerns (strategic interventions by the intermediary) with long-term path dependency and evolutionary concerns (influences of past and future temporal rhythms) for IIs