EAGER: EXPLORING FEDERATIONS OF CAMPUS AND NATIONAL CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE AS SCALABLE PLATFORMS FOR SCIENCE: A CASE STUDY USING OPEN SCIENCE GRID

Advanced computing and data cyberinfrastructure (ACI) is playing an increasingly important role in all areas of computational and data-enabled science and engineering (CDS&E), and has become a key enabler of scientific insights and innovation. As a result, it is critical that researchers and students have access to adequate campus ACI (e.g., computing and data resources). However, it is also critical that such a campus ACI aligns and is integrated with national initiatives, to connect with and share advanced computing/data resources and expertise, enable collaborative and end-to-end science, and build upon and leverage existing federal investments in high end infrastructure. This EAGER focus on three main thrusts: (1) develop the expertise and experience at Rutgers for establishing a campus ACI for CDS&E research, and to align it with the national ACI by integrating this campus ACI as part of a national resource, i.e., Open Science Grid (OSG); (2) develop the necessary research partnerships based on the OSG federated ACI to address important research problems in an end-to-end manner and lead to significant insights; and (3) document processes, experiences, and lesson learnt during this process to share these findings with the broader community, providing a 'cook- book'.Establishing campus ACI ecosystems is a common practice that Universities follow in order to support their research and education missions. However, these campus ACI ecosystems typically operate in isolation, restricting the access to resources and therefore the potential impact that they can offer to the community beyond their own campuses. The outcomes of this research will provide important insights into the feasibility of leveraging national investments to create resource pools where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As a result, it can have significant impact on the mindset of faculty, campus IT, and administrators, and on the overall ability of campus IT groups to support the advanced computing needs of researchers. The resulting models for collaboration will be seeded through shared ACI to incentivize resource and expertise sharing that can enable faculty and students to leverage a much larger and more robust set of resources. It will also help foster the creation of necessary support teams to support science and scholarship.