March 2016 progress report

Cyberinfrastructure is broadly defined as the human and technological support framework for advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization, data curation and other computing and information processing services within the research environment. Research Computing has been growing to meet the needs of researchers on campus with a number of improvements, new services, and a new direction. Highlights of 2015 include the following: More than one petabyte of newly installed General Purpose Research Storage has been installed on campus to address the urgent need for research data storage. ; The High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster has been upgraded with more capacity and an updated architecture, and user training has been expanded. ; MU faculty has helped guide the introduction of a number of grant-friendly services to help researchers gain computing capacity without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. ; A next generation 100-Gigabit Software Defined Networking (SDN) high-speed network has been installed to address the future needs of researchers and their need to access off-campus resources and remote collaboration. Through all these changes, and with the guidance of MU's Cyberinfrastructure Council, the Division of IT is striving to better support MU researchers with their computational needs

Trusted CI Experiences in Cybersecurity and Service to Open Science

This article describes experiences and lessons learned from the Trusted CI project, funded by the US National Science Foundation to serve the community as the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. Trusted CI is an effort to address cybersecurity for the open science community through a single organization that provides leadership, training, consulting, and knowledge to that community. The article describes the experiences and lessons learned of Trusted CI regarding both cybersecurity for open science and managing the process of providing centralized services to a broad and diverse community.Comment: 8 pages, PEARC '19: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 28-August 1, 2019, Chicago, IL, US

Architecting the cyberinfrastructure for National Science Foundation Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI)

The NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is a networked ocean research observatory with arrays of instrumented water column moorings and buoys, profilers, gliders and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) within different open ocean and coastal regions. OOI infrastructure also includes a cabled array of instrumented seafloor platforms and water column moorings on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. This networked system of instruments, moored and mobile platforms, and arrays will provide ocean scientists, educators and the public the means to collect sustained, time-series data sets that will enable examination of complex, interlinked physical, chemical, biological, and geological processes operating throughout the coastal regions and open ocean. The seven arrays built and deployed during construction support the core set of OOI multidisciplinary scientific instruments that are integrated into a networked software system that will process, distribute, and store all acquired data. The OOI has been built with an expectation of operation for 25 years.Peer Reviewe

Coordinative Entities: Forms of Organizing in Data Intensive Science

Scientific collaboration is a long-standing subject of CSCW scholarship that typically focuses on the development and use of computing systems to facilitate research. The research presented in this article investigates the sociality of science by identifying and describing particular, common forms of organizing that researchers in four different scientific realms employ to conduct work in both local contexts and as part of distributed, global projects. This paper introduces five prototypical forms of organizing we categorize as coordinative entities: the Principal Group, Intermittent Exchange, Sustained Aggregation, Federation, and Facility Organization. Coordinative entities as a categorization help specify, articulate, compare, and trace overlapping and evolving arrangements scientists use to facilitate data intensive research. We use this typology to unpack complexities of data intensive scientific collaboration in four cases, showing how scientists invoke different coordinative entities across three types of research activities: data collection, processing, and analysis. Our contribution scrutinizes the sociality of scientific work to illustrate how these actors engage in relational work within and among diverse, dispersed forms of organizing across project, funding, and disciplinary boundaries

A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities

Examines the state of the foundation's efforts to improve educational opportunities worldwide through universal access to and use of high-quality academic content

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures