Computing and cyberinfrastructure in support of research, scholarship, and creative activity: Forward in challenging times. PTI Seminar – Christopher S. Peebles Memorial Lectures in Information Technology,

Abstract

Computing resources provided and used in support of research, scholarship, and creative activities have been viewed as a common good since the early 1950s. At this time Marshall Wrubel, astronomer and first director of the Research Computing Center of IU, established as a principle that IU’s electronic computer was a resource available to the entire IU research community. Since that time the use of computing resources – and what is now termed cyberinfrastructure – has been expanded to include all fields of scholarship (particularly humanities research) as well as the fine and performing arts. And since the late 1990s, IU has been a national leader in the use of cyberinfrastructure to accelerate innovation and expand capabilities of the members of the IU community for decades.

We stand now at the beginning of what may be years of challenging times for research and higher education generally. Many current predictions hold that hundreds of small- to mid-size colleges and universities will become insolvent in coming years. It seems likely that federal funding for research will stay constant or decrease – and certainly decrease relative to the perceived needs of the research community – for years to come. At the same time, we face more diversity in availability of computing architectures and uncertainty in processor roadmaps than we, as a national community, have faced in years. Locally-sourced supercomputers, federally-funded cyberinfrastructure resources, commercial cloud computing, uncertainty in processor roadmaps, the end of Moore’s Law scaling, and competition from China constitute a broad set of opportunities for the IU community and challenges to the global position of the US.