On March 1 and 2, 2022, CI Compass hosted the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded “Cyberinfrastructure for NSF Major Facilities (MF) Workshop” in Redondo Beach, California. The workshop was a hybrid event that attracted 108 attendees from the NSF cyberinfrastructure (CI) and MF communities. The theme, “Getting Together, Working Together,” was reflective of the importance of a community and of collaboration, particularly as individuals and communities are trying to emerge from a global pandemic.
CI Compass Principal Investigator Ewa Deelman, Research Professor and Research Director at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, opened the workshop, welcoming online and in-person attendees to the event, which included NSF MF CI professionals, representatives from the broader NSF CI ecosystem, and participants from the NSF.
With the goal in mind for the workshop to bring MFs, CI, and the NSF together to share their best practices, discuss opportunities, and brainstorm solutions to the unique challenges the MFs face, Deelman said the event was a success.
“Getting members of the cyberinfrastructure community together to discuss the challenges they face in gathering, processing, and storing their data, and discussing socio-technical challenges helps everyone involved,” Deelman said. “Throughout the workshop, representatives from the MFs were learning from one another how each facility was approaching the next step in the evolution of their CI needs. CI Compass members were also able to explore how they can better assist MFs as their data goes through each step of the data lifecycle process.”
Manish Parashar, Office Director at the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation, gave a presentation titled “Democratizing Science Through Advanced Cyberinfrastructure” to kick-off the workshop.
“NSF Major Facilities represent some of NSF’s largest investments, enabling scientific advances and discoveries at scale with great potential for scientific and societal impact,” said Parashar, as he began his presentation. “A robust, scalable, and performant cyberinfrastructure is critical to these major facilities, to their broad and equitable use, and to their success and impact. CI Compass is making significant contributions in helping major facilities realize such as cyberinfrastructure.”
Facilities’ perspectives and challenges were represented across the NSF spectrum, including 17 MFs and three mid-scale facilities. CI Compass-partners and CI community members, including Trusted CI and the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) and more, were in attendance.
The two day event included sessions on Workforce Development brainstorming, Developing Resilience and the solutions NSF MFs learned through the COVID-19 pandemic, Making The MFs Data Lifecycle FAIR to provide AI-Ready Data, Cyberinfrastructure Challenges faced by MFs and potential solutions, migration of data and services to the Cloud, and nine lightning talks showcasing various facets of the NSF CI ecosystem. All Workshop agenda and materials are available online. The workshop report is available here to view.
For more information about future events, please follow @CiCompass on Twitter, @CI Compass on LinkedIn, and by joining the CI Compass Mailing Lists.
About CI Compass
CI Compass is funded by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering under grant number 2127548. Its participating research institutions include the University of Southern California, Indiana University, Texas Tech University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Utah.
To learn more about CI Compass, please visit ci-compass.org.
Contact:
Christina Clark, Research Communications Specialist
CI Compass / Notre Dame Research / University of Notre Dame
cclark26@nd.edu / 574.631.2665
ci-compass.org / @cicompass
