CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE:

ENABLING SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING RESEARCH

In this presentation, we consider the ongoing revolution in science and engineering (S&E), a revolution enabled by the ever greater exploitation of extant and emerging IT infrastructure – now more commonly known as cyberinfrastructure (CI). The S&E community is energized by the excitement of great possibilities, but that excitement is tempered by three daunting challenges: one, of an evergreen integration of emerging CI (the fruits of technological advances from computer science and engineering research) with the extant CI to produce a stable yet constantly refreshed infrastructure environment; two, of striking a balance between shared CI and domain-specific CI to reduce redundancy, mediate interoperability across S&E domains and yet retain the flexibility to enable the rapid advancement of each frontier; and three, of facing up to social challenges that accompany all opportunities that are truly revolutionary in scope.

Over a period spanning multiple decades, the S&E community has a productive track record of enabling and transformational advances in CI, in large part thanks to NSF support. “The S&E research (and societal) landscape of the future we leave as a painting in progress, with just a hint that the long-term outcome for all will be extraordinarily sensitive to the quality of decisions as well as the quantity of investments to be made in the next year or two.”