1. Campus Cyberinfrastructure
Guy Almes, ECAR-CCI Working Group Chair
Director, Academy for Advanced Telecommunications and Learning Technologies, Texas A&M University
ECAR Annual Meeting
28 January 2014 • Tempe, AZ

2. Past Work: NSF CACI Reports
From early 2011 through May 2012, we studied all six of the Task Force Reports to NSF’s Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure.
Grand Challenges
HPC
Data and Visualization
Software
Learning and Workforce
Campus Bridging
and wrote a white paper that, for each Report, summarized, reinforced, critiqued, and offered applications to ourselves.

3. Past Work: Transitioning to IPv6
In October 2013, we issued a focused report on “Transitioning to IPv6”.
This complements the technical leadership of (e.g.) the Internet2 IPv6 Working Group.
Key claim: There is a strong “value proposition” for each campus to transition to (include) IPv6 as a normative part of their network
Very short aspect: “Staying with classic IPv4” is not an option
Also, this led to an interesting twist on ECAR rules

4. Current Work: Big Data
We are now moving toward the completion of a study of how the phenomena of “big data” impacts research campus cyberinfrastructure.
Think of “big” as suggesting “some aspects of the bigness is a key challenge in getting things done”.
Aspects:
Volume
Velocity
Variety
Veracity

5. Challenges due to Volume
Good news: 3 TByte drives are inexpensive.
Bad news: the value to users of large datasets is growing even faster, so creating and operating file systems in the petabyte range
So funding, highly expert staffing are important.
Comment on Jevons Paradox
Also, Volume drives the difficulty of moving data across the country

6. Challenges due to Velocity
Rate of production of new data
What to discard; what to keep?
Large Hadron Collider as an example

7. Challenges due to Variety and Veracity
Deeper challenges of scientific data management
Metadata needs for searching
Unfortunately, more discipline-specific than we’d like
Issues relating to provenance
Documenting the data, where did it come from
Issues relating to reproducibility
Could you repeat an experiment 10 years from now?
Example from genomics

8. Elements of a Vision Consider a new faculty member
Over a period of, say, 30 years, they will gather data, crunch, produce data, evolve their codes, share with colleagues
How could that faculty member organize their data and codes so that, e.g., a student 15 years from now could work from a recently completed project?

9. Challenges to funding agencies
NSF and other funding agencies are requiring data management plans, but this is often perceived as a hassle
These funding agencies could identify emerging best practices from the best of these plans
They could then identify/fund the creation of tools needed to make adopting such best practices relatively easy
Then they could encourage adoption of these best practices by PIs

10. Challenges to InCommon
Controlled sharing of datasets is a broad theme
At least notionally, consider the use of “Access Control Lists” to name the individuals/groups who may read or write a given dataset
Emerging technologies from InCommon could support nationwide approaches to naming such individuals/groups

11. Challenges to the Internet2 community
Moving big data is increasingly hard. For example, the time required to move $100 worth of storage across the country is increasing over time.
Emerging technologies, including 100-Gb/s wide-area networks (both Internet2 backbone and RONs) and the ScienceDMZ structure on our campuses, are helping us address this

12. Challenges to ourselves
The CCI WG has participants from (at least) two groups on campus:
HPC computing groups, experienced at supporting computing and, increasingly, highly capable parallel file systems
Library groups, experienced at organizing data in the increasingly digital university setting
How can we, together, support our researchers to address the data management challenges resulting from big data

13. Broad CCI emphases
Enabling campus CI as an enabler of research by faculty, students, and staff
Whatever, of a conceptual, technical, or practical nature, inhibits this enabling is an enemy