Fischer, J.L.

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ACCI Recommendations on Long Term Cyberinfrastructure 
Issues: Building Future Development 
 
Jeremy Fischer 
Indiana University 
9 September 2014 
 
 
Citation: 
Fischer, J.L. 2014. “ACCI Recommendations on Long Term Cyberinfrastructure 
Issues: Building Future Development.” Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. 
September, 2014. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2022/18713
  1 
In 2009, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) 
created six task forces to make recommendations to the NSF in the strategic areas of cyberinfrastructure: 
Campus Bridging, Data, Grand Challenges and Virtual Organizations, High Performance Computing, 
Software and Tools, and Work Force Development. These task forces were led by ACCI members and 
consisted of members of the industrial and academic communities. Over a two-year period, through 
meetings, workshops, position and white papers, and other outreach, these task forces gathered ideas and 
information in their respective areas and composed a final report outlining recommendations for 
furthering cyberinfrastructure to support NSF research. 
In looking at the development of the next-generation cyberinfrastructure for NSF research, it is helpful to 
have the recommendations of the previous ACCI task forces. These recommendations may give a strong 
foundation for future designs. In this paper, the relevant findings of the various ACCI task forces will be 
covered and included. With this guidance as the bedrock, the next generation cyberinfrastructure will 
benefit from the experience of a wide swath of NSF researchers and contributors.  
 
Recommendations from the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on 
Grand Challenges [1] 
• NSF should work with the Department of Energy and other agencies in creation of an Interagency 
Working Group con CS&E or generally on Computational Science and Engineering, including 
Data-Intensive Computing, in the spirit of other NSF-wide working groups. This broad-based 
Working Group could provide input leading to important interagency collaborations on new 
programs, particularly in HPC, and could lead to more focused and efficient use of resources to 
address the Grand Challenges facing our nation. 
• It is recommended that NSF, through OCI, continue to give priority to funding a sustained and 
diverse set of HPC and innovative equipment resources to support the wide range of needs within 
the research community. These needs include support for the development of technologies to 
meet the foremost challenges in HPC, such as the power-aware and application-sensitive 
architectures, new numerical algorithms to efficiently use petascale and exascale architectures 
and data flow and data analysis at the extreme scale. 
Recommendation from the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Data 
and Visualization [2] 
• Recognize data infrastructure and services as essential research assets fundamental to today’s 
science and as long-term investments in national prosperity. Make specific budget provisions for 
the establishment and maintenance of data sets and services and the associated software and 
visualization tools infrastructure. 
Recommendations from the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on 
Software for Science and Engineering [3] 
• NSF should take leadership in promoting verification, validation, sustainability, and 
reproducibility through software developed with federal support. 
• NSF support for software should entail collaborations among all of its divisions, related federal 
agencies, and private industry 
• NSF should develop a consistent policy on open source software that promotes scientific 
discovery and encourages innovation. 
Recommendations from the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on High 
Performance Computing [4] 
• Develop a sustainable model to provide the academic research community with access, by 2015–
2016, to a rich mix of HPC systems that: 
  2 
o Deliver sustained performance of 20–100 petaflops on a broad range of science and 
engineering applications; 
o Are integrated into a comprehensive national CI environment; and 
o Are supported at national, regional, and/or campus levels. 
• Invest now to prepare for exascale systems that will be available by 2018–2020. NSF should 
consider the use of co-design partnerships to provide the HPC systems and data CI needed to 
enable data-driven science. 
• Establish a continuing process for soliciting community input on plans for HPC investments 
Recommendations from the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on 
Campus Bridging [5] 
• As part of a strategy of coherence between the NSF and campus cyberinfrastructure and reducing 
reimplementation of multiple authentication systems, the NSF should encourage the use of the 
InCommon Federation global federated system by using it in the services it deploys and supports, 
unless there are specific technical or risk management barriers.  
• The NSF should create a new program funding high-speed (currently 10 Gbps) connections from 
campuses to the nearest landing point for a national network backbone. The design of these 
connections must include support for dynamic network provisioning services and must be 
engineered to support rapid movement of large scientific data sets. 
• The NSF should establish a national cyberinfrastructure software roadmap. Through the Software 
Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) or other programs, the NSF should seek to 
systematically fund the creation and ongoing development and support of a suite of critical 
cyberinfrastructure software that identifies and establishes this roadmap, including 
cyberinfrastructure software for authentication and access control; computing cluster 
management; data movement; data sharing; data, metadata, and provenance management; 
distributed computation / cycle scavenging; parallel computing libraries; network performance 
analysis / debugging; VO collaboration; and scientific visualization. Funding for personnel should 
be a strong portion of such a strategy. 
• The NSF should fund activities that support the evolution and maturation of cyberinfrastructure 
through careful analyses of needs (in advance of creating new cyberinfrastructure facilities) and 
outcomes (during and after the use of cyberinfrastructure facilities). The NSF should establish 
and fund processes for collecting disciplinary community requirements and planning long-term 
cyberinfrastructure software roadmaps to support disciplinary community research objectives. 
The NSF should likewise fund studies of cyberinfrastructure experiences to identify attributes 
leading to impact, and recommend a set of metrics for the development, deployment, and 
operation of cyberinfrastructure, including a set of guidelines for how the community should 
judge cyberinfrastructure technologies in terms of their technology readiness. All NSF-funded 
cyberinfrastructure implementations should include analysis of effectiveness including formal 
user surveys. All studies of cyberinfrastructure needs and outcomes, including ongoing studies of 
existing cyberinfrastructure 
 
In revisiting these recommendations from 2009, examining the progress in the years since, and finding the 
gaps between 2009’s recommendations and 2014’s practices, we can establish an updated framework for 
building the next generation cyberinfrastructure. Part of Indiana University’s ongoing commitment to the 
XSEDE project and notably the Campus Bridging program is to help extend the scientific 
cyberinfrastructure seamlessly into more organizations as well as into organizations that are currently not 
well served or represented. Designing the next generation of cyberinfrastructure with that in mind might 
allow for both broader and deeper research that goes beyond the traditional organizations represented.  
  3 
Indiana University has also significantly contributed in other ways to the recommendations the ACCI task 
forces provided. IU has partnered with the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to further the 
goals of creating collaborative space for data analysis and management. [6] Wrangler will provide fast, 
reliable, and replicated storage for researchers, a necessary part of cyberinfrastructure for managing and 
sharing data.  
IU has also been a major contributor to the Apache Airavata project. In contributing to Airavata, IU is 
helping to create sustainable, easily implemented, free software for “executing and managing 
computational jobs and workflows on distributed computing resources including local clusters, 
supercomputers, national grids, academic and commercial clouds.” [7] In implementing Airavata, IU and 
its collaborators are helping to lower the barriers to research computing and to simplify specific 
workflows. 
As part of the goals of supporting grand challenges, IU houses and supports one of two computation and 
data storage clusters in support of the ATLAS Midwest Tier 2 Center (MWT2). These systems provide “a 
high-throughput, data-intensive analysis and simulation facility for proton collisions recorded by the 
ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), based at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, 
Switzerland.” [8] In combination with the Open Science Grid, whose Grid Operations Center is based at 
IU, these resources are interconnected with other Tier 1 and Tier 2 centers, creating a single service for 
researchers. 
Creating an infrastructure that is more easily accessible to a broader range of researchers at all types of 
universities should be a primary goal of any design ideas. In that process, designers must take into 
account the jumps in data size and the need to transport it quickly and easily for collaboration. Current 
state of the art focuses on reliability and robustness, and has made significant gains in providing solid 
services in a fashion familiar to a very large number of users.  In order for the national cyberinfrastructure 
ecology to evolve, it must reach new research communities, including the social sciences and the 
humanities and support novel types of analyses.  The design goals for this process must keep an emphases 
on reducing barriers to collaboration, dealing with the increasing scale of data sets and analyses, and 
supporting new and infrastructures for analyses in a broad range of scientific domains. The end result 
should be a design for the next generation that concentrates on being inclusive, reliable, fast, and 
seamless. 
  
  4 
References 
[1] NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Grand Challenges. Final Report. 
March 2011. http://www.nsf.gov/cise/aci/taskforces/TaskForceReport_GrandChallenges.pdf 
[2] NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Data and Visualization. Final 
Report. March 2011. http://www.nsf.gov/cise/aci/taskforces/TaskForceReport_Data.pdf 
[3] NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Software for Science and 
Engineering. Final Report. March 2011. 
http://www.nsf.gov/cise/aci/taskforces/TaskForceReport_Software.pdf 
[4] NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on High Performance Computing. Final 
Report. March 2011. http://www.nsf.gov/cise/aci/taskforces/TaskForceReport_HPC.pdf 
[5] NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Campus Bridging. Final Report. 
March 2011. http://www.nsf.gov/cise/aci/taskforces/TaskForceReport_CampusBridging.pdf 
[6] IU plays key role in two new supercomputing systems. IT News. January 14, 2014. 
http://itnews.iu.edu/articles/2014/iu-plays-key-role-in-two-new-national-supercomputing-systems.php 
[7] Apache Airavata. Retrieved September 9, 2014. http://airavata.apache.org/ 
[8] MWT2 : ATLAS Midwest Tier 2 Center. Laboratory for Advanced Numerical Simulations. Retrieved 
September 9, 2014. http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/LANS/research/index.php?p=proj_detail&id=86 
 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
This document was developed with support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant OCI-1053575 
for “XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment.” Any opinions, findings, and 
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not 
necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. 
More information is available at http://xsede.org 
 
This document was also made possible with support by the Indiana University Pervasive Technology 
Institute. 
More information is available at http://pti.iu.edu 
 
 


ACCI Recommendations on Long Term Cyberinfrastructure Issues: Building Future Development

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ACCI Recommendations on Long Term Cyberinfrastructure Issues: Building Future Development

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