EAGER: Democratizing the use of Advanced Computational Resources

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Advanced cyberinfrastructure is becoming increasingly central to research across virtually all fields and disciplines. Yet, researchers in many fields and disciplines do not know what is available or how to engage with the cyberinfrastructure. Further, longstanding digital divides across universities and colleges limit access to cyberinfrastructure and the needed expertise to fully utilize advanced cyberinfrastructure capabilities. The environment also requires continuous learning and capacity building on the part of cyberinfrastructure professionals and institutions. This threatens to further exacerbate the "digital divide" our nation is experiencing. Unless we can find ways to more effectively provide access, training, education, and assistance to the much larger group of "non-expert users" from small colleges and underserved institutions, the digital divide will persist and will continue to expand. This EAGER project will address these gaps through a series of multiple focus group interviews in four general areas and will generate a needs assessment that can inform national investments in the research cyberinfrastructure. The goal of the first set of focus groups is to better understand the present state and future potential of advanced computing from students and researchers who are already motivated to use compute facilities but are not doing so currently. The goal of the second set of focus groups is to identify new applications that use compute resources including non-traditional approaches and research domains that currently do not use advanced cyberinfrastructure capabilities. The goal of the third set of focus groups is to identify mechanisms for engaging remote or underserved potential users of advanced computing resources and to better understand the barriers to their access and use of these resources. The goal of the fourth set of focus groups is to explore the opportunities and challenges under-served institutions and smaller campuses face in using advanced cyberinfrastructure resources. This will include a focus on identifying barriers to institutional support, including challenges facing campus leaders and administrators given additional pressures caused by the current pandemic.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.