Participants will divide into 3 groups selected by campus champions - BoF attendees to select the topic group of their choice. Each group will discuss their topic for ~ 45 minutes; at the culmination of the individual group discussions, each group lead will be allotted 5 minutes for both a lightning summary talk on their topic.
1. Designing and sustaining a financial model for CI to enable centralized and shared resources institutionally. As the number of campuses involved in research computation continues to grow, a primary concern is that of sustaining the CI program financially over a broad course of time.
- Discussion will highlight the progressive models and methods currently being employed at institutions; as well as future opportunities and directions such as regionally shared centers, agency diversification, realistic expectations and needs, staffing, etc.
- Special attention will be given to how to design a financial model for CI that can be bolstered through a more intense on-campus awareness program, targeting the key financial stakeholders, such as the PIs, the Directors/C-level officers of research computing, and the institution’s administration that governs the research office budget.
2. InfoSCi – Information Security for Cyberinfrastructure.
In light of new mandates from the federal awarding agencies requiring grant proposals to incorporate cybersecurity into research project’s lifetime award for the Data Management Plan and Data Governance to meet the controls sets for HRCI (High Risk and Confidential Information) and CUI (Controlled Unclassified Information);
Information Security has become of paramount importance to PIs, CCs, and universities research C-level leaders.
As a result this topic - InfoSci - is receiving much due diligence and rightfully so.
- Information security has begun to be incorporated into existing awards, and is been built into new awards solicitations, spurred by the need to heighten the security of research infrastructure and the data through the various stages of the data and system life cycle.
- How to develop, equip and grow the “next generation” of cyber practitioners and users - specifically the student body, through the introduction of security best practices to effectively incorporate Information security into the various arms of CyberInfrastructure (Personnel, Compute, Storage, Networking, Visualization) to interweaving InfoSCi into the fabric of research computing, while achieving projects goals and meeting the security requirements of the award agencies, in this evolving future of CyberInfrastructure.
3. Storage Models for Research Computing
The proliferation of data continues to grow rapidly from the availability of large research repositories and growth of local instrumentation with high resolution. This increase in the volume of data been generated, has created a lot of pressure for Research Computing organization to create a sustainable model for storage that is flexible, scalable, and low cost. A well organized plan (or lack thereof) can have a profound impact on the local research community.
- Who are the key parties responsible for the data/storage plan? PIs commonly rely on their research students to design and support their compute and storage resources in small silos, but should they?
- How do the storage needs of STEM and Social Sciences differ?
- Students engagement in the CI Plan can positively impact the move to a centralized storage model, especially for small research institutions - large research institutions are less likely faced with the same financial constraints that smaller institutions face. Most early career PIs rely on their students to design and support their award-purchased HPC cluster silos, and the same can be said of some seasoned researchers. Hence, there are benefits to engaging students in an institution’s CI Plan, and the onus is on the Campus CI Working Group to begin to involve PIs-associated research students from both the STEM and Social Sciences fields in aiding the build-out of a centralized Storage Model for Research Computing.
