Data-enabled Pathways to Equity in Cyberinfrastructure Utilization for Scientific Discovery

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This research addresses the salient challenge of equity in the utilization of publicly-supported advanced computing resources for research and innovation. Advanced computing resources have increasingly become a critical production factor for the advancement of science and national competitiveness. However, the utilization of such advanced computing resources tends to give advantages to well-resourced institutions and widen the equity gap between these institutions and minority or other under-resourced institutions. This project aims to provide data-enabled pathways to advance equity in the utilization of advanced computing resources. To achieve the goal, the research team implements three interconnected tasks: (a) understanding and defining equity from the stakeholders' perspectives, (b) studying and designing pathways to equity in utilization, and (c) developing and implementing a knowledge portal featuring an interactive data platform to support these pathways to more equitable utilization. These pathways unlock the talents and insights of the researchers in underserved institutions and fields of science for advancing scientific discovery and elevating national competitiveness. This research studies and provides data-enabled pathways to equity in publicly-supported cyberinfrastructure utilization for scientific discovery. Cyberinfrastructure integrates hardware, software, people, and systems to provide geographically dispersed but operationally integrated advanced computing services to researchers. Equity is a core public value but a concern for utilizing cyberinfrastructure that favors high-capacity research institutions and principal investigators. The NSF’s cyberinfrastructure programs serve as an empirical focal point for understanding equity due to their scale, distributional effects, and impacts on scientific discovery. This project team assembles a database of NSF cyberinfrastructure utilization for 25,798 projects, encompassing 10,277 principal investigators, 1,044 organizations, and 215 science fields from 2003 to 2022. This research adopts a mixed-methods exploratory sequential design by gathering, analyzing, and integrating data from (a) combining the interactive data platform with a stakeholder-focused qualitative interpretive process and (b) analyzing a socio-technical networked system by considering levels and dynamics of cyberinfrastructure activities. This research advances knowledge and practice about equity in publicly-supported advanced computing cyberinfrastructure, the pathways to achieve a more equitable utilization, and the role of an interactive data and knowledge platform to enable these pathways. This project is jointly funded by the Science of Science program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.