By Dana Brunson, Internet2; Tom Cheatham, University of Utah; Ruth Marinshaw, Stanford University; Deb McCaffrey, University of Michigan
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Calling all research computing and cyberinfrastructure professionals: the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) wants to hear from you! We are reaching out to professionals in the research cyberinfrastructure space to ask for your participation in the XSEDE-supported Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) Decadal Survey aimed at helping to forecast developments expected in the field in the coming decade. The survey is open through Feb. 16, 2022.
Decadal surveys are instrumental in guiding the direction of research and funding in disciplines like astronomy, climate science, and bioinformatics. This is your opportunity to tell us your needs and priorities to advance research computing and cyberinfrastructure through the next decade.
As a community of experts, we have a unique view of both the variety of research we support and the equipment we use and maintain. As such, we are in the best position to identify what innovations and investments are necessary for the field of cyberinfrastructure to thrive in the future.
The survey should not take more than 10 minutes to complete, and your responses are completely anonymous. All data will be reported in the aggregate and removed of any identifying information inadvertently disclosed in your text comments.
To help reflect, here are a few examples of where the field stood approximately 10 years ago:
- GPUs are being used in High Performance Computing
- Remote sensing data processing becomes widespread
- Cloud computing has been commercially available for 5 years
- System-level virtualization comes into focus
- Carpentry instructor training starts and Software Carpentry launches its current model of instruction: two-day workshops
- The XSEDE program begins
- The top-performing computer in 2011, Sequoia, has 17.2 PFlops processing speed
- Fault-tolerance research flourishes
- Pandas, GitHub initially released in 2008
- Tensorflow initially released in 2015
- IBM Blue Gene/Q is announced in 2011
- First iPad released in 2010
- GPUBlast is introduced in 2010
- Ceph Argonaut is released in 2012
- Gluster is acquired by RedHat in 2011
- Windows Azure becomes commercially available in 2010
- In 2011, the entry-level into the TOP50 was 205 Teraflop/s
- NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) starts in 2012
- Julia programming language first appears in 2012
- Go programming language first appears in 2009
- Ansible is initially released in 2012
- Spack is released as an open-source project in 2014
- World’s largest storage array in 2011 was 120 petabytes using 200,000 hard drives
Help us chart the course to where our field goes next in the next decade! Complete this important survey to let us know your thoughts. Look for the survey results and the insights they provide about research computing and cyberinfrastructure later this year.