Addressing the national need for more diversity and aggregate investment in cyberinfrastructure supporting open science and engineering research

Abstract

There are tremendous unmet demands for interactive, user-driven advanced cyberinfrastructure tools best delivered from cloud environments. As leaders of the NSF-funded Jetstream cloud system, we set out some of the many pressing scientific needs for cloud-based computing in disciplines ranging from genomics to engineering to field biology to observational astronomy. At the same time, there is increasing demand for traditional resources at the tens of PetaOPs level as well as exascale computing. Going forward, one can expect that NSF investments in cyberinfrastructure will represent a decreasing fraction of total national investment in advanced CI supporting open science and engineering research. There is only one solution to maintaining US global leadership in innovation while meeting the large and diverse CI needs faced by the national research community: a net increase in financial investment in CI resources from a diversity of financial resources. The NSF has within its means and power the ability to do much to coordinate diverse sources of investment and diverse resources that will support open research in academic and government research laboratories throughout the US by providing technical leadership, creating financial incentives, and leveraging investments that include but go far beyond NSF’s direct investments in advanced cyberinfrastructure resources.