Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Facilitation amplifies the productivity of researchers engaged in computing-intensive and data-intensive investigations. CI Facilitators help researchers to adapt their workflows to CI resources, and teaches these researchers how to use these systems, bridging between researchers and technology experts. The importance of CI Facilitators is well understood, and there is broad consensus about their need for ongoing training, especially because of not only their highly diverse career backgrounds and domains of expertise, but also the rapid advancement of CI technologies. The Virtual Residency Program (VRP) has been addressing this training gap since 2015, offering summer workshops that teach key CI Facilitation skills. These workshops are community driven and community developed. The 2020 VRP workshop, for the first time, featured an external evaluation of the efficacy and value of the workshop. This paper examines the results of that evaluation, to determine the value of the VRP to the CI Facilitator community, and thus to the many researchers these CI Facilitators serve.
Research productivity has been greatly enhanced by Research Computing Facilitation teams to help them maximize their use of advanced cyberinfrastructure. However, researchers have more technology needs than advanced cyberinfrastructure, such as data management and instrument device support. To address this, the Academic Engagement team in Michigan Medicine added Research Liaisons as another layer of human support on top of the Facilitation team.
The Liaisons are relationship builders. They are assigned to departments to build deep relationships with them and start proactively addressing labs’ technology needs. They also build relationships with other teams, notably enterprise storage, enterprise networking, and research core facilities. These relationships allow Liaisons to provide a connective tissue between the researchers and IT teams.
We describe the first Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model Community Dataset, aggregating the assessments of 41 Higher Education Institutions. These assessments were completed using the 1.0 version of the Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model (RCD CM), over a period of several months in the Spring and Summer of 2020. The RCD CM allows organizations to self-evaluate across a range of RCD services and capabilities for supporting research, leveraging a shared vocabulary to describe RCD support. The Model supports a range of stakeholders and provides structured input to guide strategic planning and enable benchmarking relative to peer institutions. This Community Dataset provides insight into the current state of support for RCD across the community and in a number of key sub-communities. The dataset shows stark differences between Public and Private institutions, between institutions with a larger and smaller share of national funding, etc. In many cases, the patterns in the data confirm common perceptions about support across the community, but the dataset provides a quantitative baseline for understanding current RCD support, as well as granular insights to groups of institutions that are seeking to collaborate on shared solutions and strategies to advance RCD support. Over time, longitudinal data will provide additional insight into trends, and a means of evaluating the impact of programs designed to increase RCD support.
Many smaller, mid-sized and under-resourced campuses, including MSIs, HSIs, HBCUs and EPSCoR institutions, have compelling science research and education activities along with an awareness of the benefits associated with better access to cyberinfrastructure (CI) resources. These schools can benefit greatly from resources and expertise to augment their in-house efforts. The Eastern Regional Network’s (ERN) Broadening the Reach (BTR) working group is addressing this by focusing on learning directly from the under-resourced academic institutions in the region on how best to support them for research collaboration and advanced computing requirements. ERN BTR findings and recommendations will be shared based on engagement with the community, including workshop and survey results, as part of the NSF sponsored CC*CRIA: The Eastern Regional Network Award OAC-2018927.
The United States science and engineering community face multiple challenges related to funding and funding policies for science and engineering. A framework is needed to evaluate the impact scientific facilities and instruments. In this paper, we demonstrate such an activity through our comprehensive work evaluating the scientific impact of XSEDE using the Semantic Scholar Data. In contrast to other studies, our study includes the bibliographic references of all recorded papers related to XSEDE over the entire performance period till April of 2021. This makes this study unique and distinguishes it from our earlier work while using (a) over 180 million papers as a comparison to our peer analysis, (b) include all publications reported, and (c) conduct the study repeatedly over several years to verify its validity.
The Connect.Cyberinfrastructure.org (Cnct.CI) Portal, originally known as the Cyberteam Portal, was developed to support the management of project workflows and to capture project results for the Northeast Cyberteam (NECT). The NECT is an NSF-sponsored program that aims to make regional and national cyberinfrastructure more readily accessible to researchers in small and mid-sized institutions in northern New England by providing research computing facilitation support and aggregating access to knowledge resources. More recently, the Cnct.CI Portal has expanded to provide support for a variety of programs in the Research Computing ecosystem, creating opportunities for collaboration and leveraging a consistent, cohesive approach to common challenges. As reported at SC20, a pilot was launched in July 2020 to enable six additional Cyberteam programs to explore the use of the Portal as a management tool for their related programs. In addition, in January of 2021 the leadership team of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Campus Champions decided to use the Portal to modernize participant management and onboarding functions. Portal details, preliminary results of these expansion efforts and future plans are discussed.
