The Cyberinfrastructure Research Taskforce met during the 2004-05 academic year to consider Indiana University’s (IU) needs for shared cyberinfrastructure investments. In particular, the charge to the taskforce asked scholars to focus on needs that could help support a doubling of IU’s externally funded research by 2010-2011.
This report to the IU Vice President for Research & Information Technology conveys 10 specific recommendations. It recognizes both current progress in cyberinfrastructure development while also proposing new directions for cyberinfrastructure needs and opportunities.
In summary, the recommendations affirm a continuity of investment in the core IT infrastructure that is the foundation for advanced cyberinfrastructure. Developing deep capabilities for serving the complete
research data lifecycle emerged as a clear and pervasive theme across many disciplines. The recommendations provide guidance for storage capacity; data movement across networks; collection, annotation and provenance; and data publishing, curation, and custodianship. The taskforce advocated
“continuing without pause” renewed investment in IU’s High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and visualization facilities and strongly advocated HPC as a competitive necessity for data-intensive
scholarship.
Beyond the technology investments, the taskforce gave considerable analysis to scholars’ needs in making productive use of cyberinfrastructure. The taskforce recommends investments in an array of subsidized and chargeback consulting services, complexity-hiding interfaces, and training programs that each are discipline-facing in their orientation rather than a homogenized one-size-fits-all.
Finally, developing and sustaining advanced cyberinfrastructure will be impossible with only university sources of funding. The taskforce strongly advocates aggressive partnerships and leadership at the state,
national, and international levels to compete for all forms of external funding to continue incremental evolution of IU’s cyberinfrastructure.
The report itself provides many more details beyond these recommendations. Diverse scholarly endeavors are evolving their use of cyberinfrastructure in different ways. Nevertheless, the themes and specific recommendations presented here represent a resounding consensus view across these disciplines for the shared cyberinfrastructure needs of IU’s scholars
