Tag Archives: NSF

Fall Member Meeting Recap: Collocation, Collaboration, Higher Ed Video Highlights and Happy 35th OARnet!

Another Quilt Fall Member Meeting is in the books, and we had a great time in Ohio!

Building on the success of several years of collocating events, this year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincided with the NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and KNIT 7, the third in-person FABRIC Community Workshop. It also was timed to celebrate the Ohio Academic Resources Network’s (OARnet) 35th Anniversary.

“Our research and education networking community is comprised of extremely talented and dedicated individuals working collaboratively toward a common mission. It’s a special time when our Quilt community is able to get together in person,” said Jen Leasure, president and CEO of The Quilt. “We appreciate the opportunity to once again collocate our fall meeting with other important community events. We are especially grateful for the opportunity to help OARnet, one of our founding Quilt members, celebrate their 35th anniversary.”

“It was an amazing week for OARnet,” added Pankaj Shah, executive director OARnet and past chair of The Quilt Board of Directors. “You left us local attendees with a joyous memory of a wonderful anniversary celebration.”

Ohio has 14 public universities, 24 regional branch campuses, 23 community colleges, and a statewide workforce education and training network. Ohio Higher Education provided a video highlight of some of the discussions from the Fall Member Meeting.

Happy anniversary once again, OARnet!

We look forward to seeing you again soon. Be on the lookout for our 2024 meeting schedule.

 

2023 Fall Member Meeting heads to Columbus

Our 2023 Fall Member Meeting is this week, and we have a great program lined up for Quilt members, affiliates and guests at The Hyatt Regency in downtown Columbus, Ohio, on Sept. 25-27. We are looking forward to this gathering of our national Quilt community and stakeholders to collaborate, exchange resources with one another, and collectively advance networking for research and education.

Building on the success of several years of collocating events, this year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and KNIT 7, the third in-person FABRIC Community Workshop. It also is timed to celebrate OARnet’s 35th Anniversary and their Fall Member Meeting.

Some of the best networking minds in the country will be gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges and to support researchers in their scientific discoveries.

Highlights of the meeting agenda include a joint networking reception, plenaries on digital equity and inclusion, and discussions around Internet for All, BEAD, and state broadband strategic planning. We also are excited to facilitate additional conversations on AI in networking, cybersecurity, innovation, quantum networking, Quilt Member Lightning Talks, and much more.

We have a dynamic program in store, and we are looking forward to the opportunity to bring all these great groups together in one place.

You can participate in social media conversations using #QuiltinOH or @TweettheQuilt.

See you in Columbus!

2019 Fall Member Meeting heads to Minnesota

Our 2019 Fall Member Meeting is next week, and we have a great program lined up for Quilt members, affiliates and guests at The Downtown Renaissance Hotel – The Depot on Sept. 24-26 in Minneapolis.

At the invitation of our Quilt member, Northern Lights GigaPoP, The Quilt is excited to have our community gather in the Twin Cities to learn, share, and collectively advance networking for research and education.

Building on the success of several years of collocating events, this year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure and Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the Third National Research Platform (NRP) Workshop.

Some of the best networking minds in the country will be gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges to support researchers in their scientific discoveries.

The meeting agenda is available here. Highlights include a joint networking reception, plenaries on bridging the rural divide, telling community stories with broadband data, and refraction networking with additional highlights include an overview of novel infrastructure services to support campus eSports, a CyberRISK (Regional Information Security Knowledge-sharing) Workshop, updates on the Internet2 Community Anchors Program, securing research at scale, spectrum experiments from the UETN Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), Quilt Member Lightning Talks, and much more.

We have a dynamic program in store for you! We are looking forward to the opportunity to bring all these great groups together all in one place, and thanks again to Quilt member Northern Lights GigaPoP for the invitation.

For meeting logistics and registration, please contact Tracey Norris at tracey@thequilt.net

You can participate in social media conversations using #QuiltinMinn or @TweettheQuilt.

See you next week Minneapolis!

The Quilt offers guidance on NSF cyberinfrastructure future plans

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made cyberinfrastructure a central theme in its plans for developing and delivering tools to enhance scientific discovery.

This year, between January and April, the NSF sought input from the research community on science challenges and associated cyberinfrastructure needs over the next decade and beyond. The federal agency was looking for bold, forward-looking ideas to help advance the frontiers of science and engineering over the next decade and beyond (NSF CI 2030). This activity also recognized that researchers in varying disciplines may need different resources; may have differing priorities for access, interoperability, and continuity; and may require external expertise to address the most critical problems in their specific disciplines.

Please refer to Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) NSF 17-31 for full background information on this activity.

What is Cyberinfrastructure?

Cyberinfrastructure was first used by the NSF to describe research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualization and other computing and information processing services distributed over high-speed networks beyond the scope of a single institution. It is classified as a technological and sociological solution to the problem of efficiently connecting laboratories, data, computers, and people to find that next great innovation or discovery.

In 2009, NSF undertook a community-informed analysis of cyberinfrastructure needs that led to the formulation of a vision, strategy, and set of initiatives entitled Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21). Since that analysis, many changes have taken place in terms of scientific challenges and opportunities as well as technological progress. To continue capitalizing on the potential provided by cyberinfrastructure to advance science and engineering research, the NSF is beginning to formulate an updated strategy in 2017 as well as concrete plans for future investments in this area.

The NSF Cyberinfrastructure Special Report offers more in-depth presentations on cyberinfrastructure.

The Quilt Contribution

The Quilt has provided a response to the NSF’s Request for Information on Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research (NSF CI 2030).

Regional research and education (R&E) networks play a critical role in providing the underpinning fabric that makes possible local, regional, national, and global collaborations using advanced cyberinfrastructure. As a non-profit consortium representing 36 regional R&E networks nationwide, The Quilt has a collective mission to support all science and engineering fields and their research challenges.

Decades of success since the initial funding of regional networks by the NSF have taught us that the geography of resources is a significant factor in supporting research pursuits and scientific discoveries. In several of its current cyberinfrastructure programs, NSF has recognized that coordination of specific cyberinfrastructure activities are most effectively coordinated at the regional level by organizations that are frequently best positioned to foster and enable collaboration across a number of boundaries and serve to maximize NSF investments for the greatest good.

These networks provide scientific researchers with the network paths and bandwidth they need to move data as well as access remote and virtualized advanced cyberinfrastructure. The networks are engineered to support high-quality services that are consistent to researchers independent of the field of study, the number of users on the network, or the number of collaborators and collaboration sites. These organizations provide a sophisticated level of network services.

The Quilt believes the following advancements in the development, deployment, and utilization of advanced cyberinfrastructure will be a key part of an ongoing national strategy to address scientific and engineering research challenges. In the RFI submission, The Quilt outlines and describes six specific technical advancements in cyberinfrastructure that must be addressed …

  1. Keeping pace with network capacity demands
  2. Distributed, federated computing with shared resource
  3. Hybrid commercial/private cloud services for research
  4. End-to-end performance of research flows
  5. Cyberinfrastructure security
  6. Development and sustainability of a diverse cyberinfrastructure workforce

*Download and view the PDF of The Quilt’s full RFI response issued out of the NSF website.

Investing in Cyberpractioners

Preliminary investments in programs that support development of “cyberpractitioner” roles at the campus and regional levels has had meaningful impact for those researchers fortunate enough to have access to these individuals. Nationally, we are just now gaining insights into the benefits of cyberpractioners on the research process with their ability to bring to bear additional research resources and tools for scientific discovery.

The Quilt affirms that the next area of focus should be the scalability and sustainability of these roles within the country’s advanced cyberinfrastructure ecosystem by creating opportunity for longer-term career paths. This will encourage these specialized individuals to remain in their field of work as they mature in these positions while also encouraging a new set of professionals to enter in these roles in the future.

Next Steps

NSF has supported advanced computing since its beginning and continues to expand access to these resources. This access helps tens of thousands of researchers each year – from high-school students to Nobel Prize winners – expand the frontiers of science and engineering, regardless of whether their institutions are large or small, or where they are located geographically. By combining superfast and secure networks, cutting-edge parallel computing and analytics, advanced scientific instruments and critical datasets across the country, the NSF’s cyber-ecosystem lets researchers investigate questions that can’t otherwise be explored.

According to NSF, the contributions and ideas collected across the country last quarter will be used this year to inform NSF’s updated strategy and plans for advanced cyberinfrastructure investments.

All submissions made to NSF will be made available on the following website: http://www.nsfci2030.org.

(Image credit: Visualization of 3-D Cerebellar Cortex model generated by researchers Angus Silver and Padraig Gleeson from University College London. The NeuroScience Gateway was used for simulations.)

NSF cyberinfrastructure report aims to awaken potential of ‘sleeping middle’

The final report on the Role of Regional Organizations in Advancing the Computational Infrastructure has been submitted to the National Science Foundation with the goal to developing recommendations to assist regional organizations to leverage their work for the benefit of the research community as well as understand what actions, if any, are needed to achieve a radical shift across a diverse set of organizations to improve coordination of, access to and utilization of the national computational infrastructure.

There are many cyberinfrastructure organizations in the space between campuses and nationally-shared cyberinfrastructure facilities that enable use of advanced cyberinfrastructure in research. According to the contributors of this report (which included staff and several members of The Quilt), now is the time to harness the collective energies of these organizations and focus them on innovating CI infrastructure and expertise while also sharing those solutions on an intra- and inter-regional basis.

“The recommendations provided in this report are aimed at awakening the potential of the ‘sleeping middle’ of regional network/CI organizations to develop and enrich the national CI ecology,” as noted in the summary.

pdf-icon-1Download a copy of the full report.

The Role of Regional Organizations in Improving Access to the National Computational Infrastructure conference was held in Kansas City, Missouri, in October 2015. A total of 36 white papers were submitted in advance, and 39 individuals were in attendance. The majority of the participants were from academic institutions, and many also represented a state, regional or national organization with significant interest in improving access to the national computational infrastructure. Contributions by white paper authors and conference attendees are grouped into key thematic areas as presented in the report in addition to two sets of recommendations – core recommendations and recommendations for actions within specific communities.

The purpose of this project was to gain input from relevant organizations and to develop a set of recommendations to reinvigorate the state of advanced cyberinfrastructure and to lay the groundwork for a vibrant, healthy national computational cyberinfrastructure that brings together all the relevant players and is flexible enough to accommodate new developments. By carefully considering the information and choosing to implement the recommendations from this 34-page report, it may be possible to accomplish broad scale change across the cyberinfrastructure landscape in support of future computational and data-intensive science in the United States and beyond.

This work was funded by National Science Foundation Award No. 1543655 to Kansas State University. Gregory E. Monaco, Ph.D. Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, and the Great Plains Network. This replaces the Draft Report submitted in March 2016.

2015 Fall Member Meeting features discussions on Pacific Research Platform, Science DMZ

For the last three years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a series of competitive grants to more than 100 universities to upgrade their campus network capacity for greatly enhanced science data access.

NSF is now building on that distributed investment by funding a $5 million, five-year award to UC San Diego and UC Berkeley to establish a Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a science-driven high-capacity data-centric “freeway system” on a large regional scale.

Within a few years, the PRP will give participating universities and other research institutions the ability to move data 1,000 times faster compared to speeds on today’s inter-campus shared Internet.

At our 2015 Fall Member Meeting joint program day with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee on Wednesday, Sept. 30, we are excited to welcome Larry Smarr, UC San Diego computer science and engineering professor, principal investigator of the PRP, and director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), to share his insight on the project.

“To accelerate the rate of scientific discovery, researchers must get the data they need, where they need it, and when they need it,” said Smarr. “This requires a high-performance data freeway system in which we use optical lightpaths to connect data generators and users of that data.”

Separately, NSF has awarded funds to hold a PRP design workshop at UC San Diego, now scheduled for October, entitled: ‘Building an Interoperable Regional Science DMZ.” This workshop will bring together the PRP application driver researchers with the distributed computer architects, the network engineers, and the multi-institutional IT/Telecom administrators to further refine the PRP implementation.

Also on our joint program day in Austin, we will discuss some of the future directions of Science DMZ. The discussion features Eli Dart, Network Engineer at ESnet, and the security in a Science DMZ with Robin Sommer, senior researcher in the Networking and Security Group at the International Computer Science Institute and Berkeley National Lab.

At the invitation of Quilt member LEARN (Lonestar Education and Research Network), The Quilt will be holding its Fall Member Meeting on Sept. 28 through Oct. 1 at the JW Marriott in downtown Austin, Texas. This year’s Fall Member Meeting also coincides with the National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure PI Workshop and the ESnet Site Coordinators Committee (ESCC).

This will be one Texas-sized meeting with the best networking minds in the country gathered all in one place for some exciting discussions on how R&E networks are uniquely positioned to meet today’s infrastructure challenges.

Thanks again to LEARN for hosting this year’s meeting. If you have not registered, online registration is still available.

You can follow the conversation now and throughout the meeting using #FMM15 or @TweettheQuilt.

We look forward to seeing you Austin!