Workshop Report - Pervasive Technology Institute - Indiana University

The goals of the workshop, reiterated from the introduction, were:
• Suggest common elements of software stacks widely usable across nation/world to promote
interoperability/economy of scale; and
• Suggested policy documents that any research university should have in place.
In response to these goals, the workshop participants put forward the following recommendations,
each captured in their own subsection.
4.1. The NSF should lead the establishment of a national CI support
system
Currently user support for CI is very distributed and uncoordinated, presenting scientists with a
substantial challenge in finding unbiased expertise when going outside their institution. Programs
such as the U.K. Campus Grid Special Interest Group [4], the NIH Knowledge Centers [5], and the
TeraGrid Campus Champion [6] programs have shown promise in addressing this problem but are
limited to specific CI projects and technologies.
The workshop recommends that the NSF foster the establishment of a CI support system
coordinated at the national level, comprised of expertise at campuses and CI projects, with sufficient
vertical and horizontal coordination to allow for the routing of scientist’s problems with CI to the
appropriate expert with minimal effort by the scientist and support staff. Such a program should
particularly seek to foster expertise on campuses, close to scientists, with buy-in from campus
leadership to ensure that support staff have their role appropriately prioritized.
There are some unknowns in the exact methodology for such a service, but the participants agreed
on some of its attributes:
• It is important that the support service be both technology and project neutral so that scientists
trust the service to provide answers that best support their science rather than providing success
stories for CI providers.
• A minimum investment to setting up such a service would be providing CI training (with travel
expenses) and recognition to support staff. This would allow staff to develop both the technical
expertise for answering user questions directly, along with the personal connections for finding
the expertise for questions outside of their knowledge.
• This service should provide a feedback mechanism for gathering and aggregating experiences
from the scientists using the CI in order to provide feedback for the larger CI ecosystem as
to both successes, to help with impact assessment, and frustrations, for recognizing where
improvement is needed.
18