What's Next for Campus Cyberinfrastructure? ACTI Responds to the NSF ACCI Reports

In February 2009, a joint workshop of the EDUCAUSE Advanced Core Technologies Initiative Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group (ACTI-CCI) and the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) issued a report and recommendations that addressed the challenges and strategies for developing a coherent cyberinfrastructure from local campus to national facilities. The report concluded that it is not only practical but also optimal to solve a large number of computational problems at the campus level.The joint report immediately preceded the formation of six task forces by the NSF-wide Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI), which were charged with investigating long-term cyberinfrastructure issues.

This white paper is a broad-based response to the findings of the ACCI Task Forces from the campus perspective. ACTI-CCI aims to provide the higher education community with a thorough and thoughtful reflection on each of the six ACCI reports and an analysis of the role of campus cyberinfrastructure in each of these areas. In developing this white paper, ACTI-CCI has concluded that campus cyberinfrastructure cannot be ignored when planning and developing the national cyberinfrastructure because many of the underlying services and activities that compose the national cyberinfrastructure are campus-based.

The white paper includes six chapters that correspond to the six ACCI Task Force reports:

1. Grand Challenges
2. Campus Bridging
3. Cyberlearning and Workforce Development
4. Data and Visualization
5. High Performance Computing
6. Software for Science and Engineering

Each chapter has four components, including: a synopsis of the NSF ACCI Task Force report, a discussion of elements that warrant reinforcing from the campus perspective, a constructive critique of elements from the campus perspective, and a discussion of the implications of the report for the leadership of campus cyberinfrastructure.

See also the First Look summary of this report from May 2012.