Campus Cyberinfrastructure Snowmass Workshop

This year’s meeting will be the first workshop for the new Net@EDU Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CCI) working group. The workshop will have two main goals:

1. Review the NSF’s “four pillars of cyberinfrastructure” to set the context and develop a roadmap of the issues we will be addressing.

   From this initial discussion, the group will draft a prioritized list of action items on which the CCI working group should focus over the next few years. Included in this discussion will be potential mechanisms to gather input from the research community as the CCI working group considers each of these topics. Finally, a schedule for regular meetings, discussions, and conference calls will be proposed and determined as the basis for our work plan. We will allocate two hours of our meeting for this section.

2. Focus on what has come to be identified as the most pressing and also most common issue in the space of cyberinfrastucture for academic IT leaders: demand on data centers to address the growth of high-performance computing clusters and the migration of academic researchers back to central IT to support this unprecedented growth. This growing problem is one of the largest, most complex, and most expensive areas of concern for IT in higher education today.

   The growth of high-performance computing clusters and peripheral equipment on university campuses has become a critical infrastructure issue. Advances in technology are now providing faculty with access to large computing clusters that cannot comfortably fit into a university’s department or research lab space. Large-sized clusters are also putting pressure on the delivery of effective and efficient power and cooling to service them. This is a high priority issue on campuses throughout the country. The CCI working group, with encouragement from the higher education community, will take up this issue at the earliest opportunity and provide guidance and recommendations to the community.

   The plan is to use the part of the morning and the afternoon workshop time to address the problem of university data centers and associated issues. The goal of the discussion will be to identify the drivers, issues, and responses associated with university data centers, develop potential models to address this problem, and outline roadmaps to the future. A limited number of short background presentations will frame the data center problem with the remainder of the morning and part of the afternoon focused on detailed group discussions to develop the strategies and potential data center business models for universities and other higher education institutions.

   The outcome of these discussions will be several business models and methods as to how higher education institutions can address these critical data center problems and infrastructure issues. The workshop models and recommendations should be in a format that can be presented to the full EDUCAUSE community at the annual meeting in Dallas in October.

Net@EDU Member Brunch

Workshop attendees remaining in Snowmass are invited to the annual Net@EDU member brunch, scheduled for Sunday, August 6, from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. Please RSVP to Valerie Vogel at vvogel@educause.edu if you plan on attending.

Seminars on Academic Computing

The CCI Workshop precedes the always thought-provoking Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC).

This is an excellent opportunity to engage your colleagues and exchange ideas on the challenges and solutions facing higher education IT leaders. Vinton Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google will be the kickoff featured speaker.