CAREER: Organizational Capacity and Capacity Building for Cyberinfrastructure Diffusion

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The vision behind advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) is that its development, acquisition, and provision will transform science and engineering in the 21st century. However, CI diffusion is full of challenges, because the adoption of the material objects also requires the adoption of a set of related behavioral practices and philosophical ideologies. Most critically, CI-enabled virtual organizations (VOs) often lack the full range of organizational capacity to effectively integrate and support the complex web of objects, practices, and ideologies as a holistic innovation.This project examines the various manifestations of CI related objects, practices, and ideologies, and the ways they support CI implementation in scientific VOs. Using grounded theory analysis of interviews and factor analysis of survey data, this project will develop and validate a robust framework/measure of organizational capacity for CI diffusion. The project's empirical focus will be the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE; https://www.xsede.org/), a nationwide network of distributed high-performance computing resources. Interviews and surveys will solicit input from domain scientists, computational technologists, and supercomputer center administrators (across e-science projects, institutions, and disciplines) who have experience with adopting and using CI tools within the XSEDE ecosystem. The project will generate a series of capacity building strategies to help VOs increase the organizational capacity necessary to fully adopt CI. Findings will help NSF and other federal agencies to improve existing and future CI investments. This project may also have implications for open-source and commercial technologies that harness big data for complex simulations, modeling, and visualization analysis.