CC*IIE Engineer: Exploration of Roles and Tools to Fulfill Diverse Researcher Needs in Collaborative Environments

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There is a need to transform supercomputer and other cyberinfrastructure (CI) resource provisioning procedures and practices on campuses with federated, hybrid cloud services handled by specialized expertise of a CI Engineer. The CI Engineer complements campus system/network engineering personnel, and leads the seamless orchestration of provisioning local and remote resources (e.g., cyber-enabled scientific instruments, public clouds) to meet data-intensive research and education needs of faculty and students.This project investigates roles, tools and policies that enable the viability and sustainability of the CI Engineer position. More than just exploration, the project involves several pilot experiments with domain-application workflows. The experiments consider connectivity and communication procedures necessary for transitioning interdisciplinary collaborations from experimental environments to production systems. To automate the provisioning of application-specific resources, custom templates are being developed for diverse data-intensive (web-based) applications. The custom templates abstract the high-level policy and performance throughput requirements of data-intensive applications, and personalize them to lower-level control specifications implementable in an on-demand manner by virtualization technologies such as OpenStack and OpenFlow. Lastly, case studies, best practices and open-source software applications are to be generated to foster hybrid cloud service models in research and education, while avoiding many layers of co-ordination. Significant attention is being paid to broadening participation of underrepresented groups, and to the CI Engineer interaction with peer communities that are addressing challenges of next-generation campus cyberinfrastructures.