Workshop Report - Pervasive Technology Institute - Indiana University

• The reward system for faculty developing CI does not encourage effort spent on supporting
users of the CI. Changing that rewards system would be difficult, and finding other avenues to
support that CI should be explored.
3.2. Importance of campuses in CI education and workforce
development
Discussions during the workshop emphasized the critical role of people in CI and the importance
of their CI-related education and training. One aspect is that a well-trained workforce is critical
to make CI a sustained infrastructure, with the stability, robustness and predictability the term
infrastructure implies and scientists increasingly expect. The observation was made that hardware
resources are increasingly cheap, but the lack of a qualified workforce for CI continues to be a
challenge. Students are not generally exposed to the task of developing reliable software and
systems. Their education focuses on research and prototyping; this has an impact “upstream” when
these students later enter the workforce.
A second aspect of CI education is the level and type of familiarity that scientists have with regards
to CI. For example, new students, who will comprise tomorrow’s scientists, having grown up with a
mature Internet and Web-based services, have both greater expectations of computational services
in terms of usage modalities (e.g., command-line versus web), robustness, ease-of-use, etc. and, in
general, less familiarity with complicated computer science concepts, command-line interfaces, and
low-level development.
Campuses play a critical role in training and education, both in terms of developing that workforce
for CI, and in training both CS and domain scientists in what CI can do for them and how to take
advantage of it. A successful strategy for enabling campus bridging needs to be providing campuses
with both the motivation and expertise to provide appropriate education with regards to CI; for
example, the University of Virginia has a CS 101 course for graduate students across disciplines.
3.3. Relationship of NSF CI, administrative computing and
commercial CI
Campus computing infrastructure can generally be categorized as administrative computing,
supporting business functions such as email, payroll, and enrollment; and research computing,
supporting scientific research. In general, research computing infrastructure is more readily usable
as part of a coordinated CI than is administrative computing infrastructure (a notable exception is
identity federation). Campus leadership generally puts more emphasis on and resources behind
administrative computing than research computing. While this is certainly reasonable given the
strong requirements for supporting the institution on administrative computing, the workshop
participants agreed that the gap could be narrowed. Outreach to CIOs, VPRs, and other campus
leadership on the benefits to science of research computing could help generate more balanced
levels of support for research computing on campuses. CI, in turn, could leverage the increased
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