Development of Large-Scale Scientific Cyberinfrastructure and the Growing Opportunity to Democratize Access to Platforms and Data

Abstract

As researchers across scientific domains rapidly adopt advanced scientific computing methodologies, access to advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) becomes a critical requirement in scientific discovery. Lowering the entry barriers to CI is a crucial challenge in interdisciplinary sciences requiring frictionless software integration, data sharing from many distributed sites, and access to heterogeneous computing platforms. In this paper, we explore how the challenge is not merely a factor of availability and affordability of computing, network, and storage technologies but rather the result of insufficient interfaces with an increasingly heterogeneous mix of computing technologies and data sources. With more distributed computation and data, scientists, educators, and students must invest their time and effort in coordinating data access and movements, often penalizing their scientific research. Investments in the interfaces’ software stack are necessary to help scientists, educators, and students across domains take advantage of advanced computational methods. To this end, we propose developing a science data fabric as the standard scientific discovery interface that seamlessly manages data dependencies within scientific workflows and CI.