Cyberinfrastructure
A Status Report
Deborah Crawford, Ph.D.
Interim Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure
National Science Foundation
Schumpeter on Innovation
Gales of Creative Destruction
On Innovation
equilibrium destruction
innovators as social leaders
New for Old
technical
sociological
Two-wave Cycle
development
exploitation
“The
opportunity
is
here
to
create
cyberinfrastructure that enables more ubiquitous,
comprehensive knowledge environments that
become functionally complete .. in terms of
people, data, information, tools, and instruments
and that include unprecedented capacity for
computation, storage, and communication.”
Cyberinfrastructure “can serve individuals, teams
and organizations in ways that revolutionize what
they do, how they do it, and who can participate.”
Report of the NSF Advisory Committee On Cyberinfrastructure,
February 2003
“Clearly, it is now possible for more people than
ever to collaborate and compete in real-time, with
more people, on more kinds of work, from more
corners of the planet, and on a more equal footing,
than at any previous time in the history of the
world.”
Thomas L. Friedman
The World is Flat, 2005
NSF Governance of Cyberinfrastructure
• Cyberinfrastructure Council (CIC) created
• CIC responsible for shared stewardship and ownership of
NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Portfolio
• SCI to OCI Realignment
• Budget transferred
• Ongoing projects transferred
• OCI focused on “production-quality” CI for research
and education
• CISE remains focused on basic research and education
mission, future generations of CI technologies/capabilities
• Strategic Planning Process Underway
Cyberinfrastructure Components
Collaboratories,
Data,
Observatories,
& Virtual Data Analysis &
Organizations Visualization
Learning
High Performance
&
Computing
Workforce
Development
All CI Things Created Equal?
Distributed Computing
Digital Data &
Data Stewardship
Learning &
Workforce Development
Collaboratories, Observatories,
& Virtual Organizations
High Performance
Computing
HPC – A National Imperative
High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force, 2004
“Issues of technology, resources and governance threaten to limit
the potential contributions of high-end computing to vital
national interests.”
NAS Report on the Future of Supercomputing, 2005
“Current U.S. investments in supercomputing and current plans
are not sufficient to provide the supercomputing capabilities that
our country will need.”
PITAC Report on Computational Science, 2005
“A dangerous consequence of our current complacency is that
we have not marshaled and focused our efforts to elevate
computational science and the computing infrastructure to their
appropriate status as a long-term strategic national priority.”
Strategic Plan for High Performance Computing
Draft issued for public comment September 30, 2005
S&E
Community
Portable, Scalable
Applications
Software &
Services
HPC Resource
Software
Service
Provider (SSP)
Science-Driven
HPC Systems
Agency
Partners
Providers
Local
Storage
SSP
Visualization
Compute Facilities
Engines
SSP
Private Sector
All CI Things Created Equal
Digital Data &
Data Stewardship
Strategic Plan for Data, Data Analysis &
Visualization
Community
Governance
And Policies
Content-Management
Organizations
Global S&E
Community
International System of
Data Collections
Agency
Partners
Common Tools
and
Services
Private Sector
Cyberinfrastructure Vision document
Publicly Available
Call to Action
Sept. 30, 2005
Strategic Plan for High Performance Computing
Sept. 30, 2005
Strategic Plan for Data, Data Analysis & Visualization
January 15, 2006 (est.)
Strategic Plan for Collaboratories, Observatories
& Virtual Organizations
March 15, 2006 (est.)
Strategic Plan for Learning & Workforce Development
March 15, 2006 (est.)
NSF Finalizes Cyberinfrastructure Vision Document early Summer, 2006
Revolutionizing Science and Engineering
“[Science is] a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually
violent revolutions . . .[in which] . . . one conceptual world view is
replaced by another.”
--Thomas Kuhn
From The Structure of Scientific Revolutions