Content uploaded by Zoe Braiterman
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Zoe Braiterman on May 15, 2018
Content may be subject to copyright.
Progress Update on the Development and Implementation of the
Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research & Education Facilitators
Virtual Residency Program
Henry Neeman
University of Oklahoma
3200 Marshall Avenue Suite 130
Norman, OK 73019
hneeman@ou.edu
Hussein M. Al-Azzawi
University of New Mexico
1601 Central Avenue NE
Albuquerque, NM 87106
azzawi@unm.edu
Aaron Bergstrom
University of North Dakota
4943 James Ray Drive
Grand Forks, ND 58202
aaron.bergstrom@und.edu
Zoe K. Braiterman
OWASP Foundation
250 West 94th Street #4G
New York, NY 10025
zoe.braiterman@owasp.org
Dana Brunson
Oklahoma State University
MSCS 106
Stillwater, OK 74078
dana.brunson@okstate.edu
Dirk Colbry
Michigan State University
1516 Engineering Building
East Lansing, MI 48824
colbrydi@msu.edu
Eduardo Colmenares
Midwestern State University
3410 Taft Blvd, Bolin Science Hall 126
Wichita Falls, TX 76310
eduardo.colmenares-diaz@mwsu.edu
Akilah N. Fuller
Jackson State University
191319 1400 J. R. Lynch Street
Jackson, MS 39217
akilahfuller@gmail.com
Sandra Gesing
University of Notre Dame
111 Information Technology Center
Notre Dame, IN 46556
sandra.gesing@nd.edu
Maria Kalyvaki
South Dakota State University
Old Horticulture 206D, Box 2201
Brookings, SD 57007
maria.kalyvaki@sdstate.edu
Claire Mizumoto
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093
claire@ucsd.edu
Jeho Park
Harvey Mudd College
301 Platt Blvd
Claremont, CA 91711
jepark@hmc.edu
Anita Z. Schwartz
University of Delaware
7176 Burgundy Drive
Niwot, CO 80503
anita@udel.edu
Jason L. Simms
Lafayette College
710 Sullivan Road
Easton, PA 18042
simmsj@lafayette.edu
Rustomji Vania
University of Texas at Dallas
17217 Waterview Parkway, Suite 2.200
Dallas, TX 75252
gvania@utdallas.edu
ABSTRACT
Cyberinfrastructure facilitation – working directly with researchers
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-
party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact
the Owner/Author.
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).
PEARC18, July 22 - 26, 2018, ,
ACM XXXXX.
http://dx.doi.org/XXXX
to advance the computing-intensive and data-intensive aspects of
their investigations, especially via large-scale and advanced
computing – has emerged as a crucial component of research
computing processes. However, because no national formal
education curriculum exists to cultivate the needed workforce,
informal education is the most viable approach. The Advanced
Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitator (ACI-REF)
Virtual Residency (VR) program, in operation since summer 2015,
is a national informal education program that trains
Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Facilitators on effective methods for
serving their research and education constituents, especially
focusing on professional (soft) skills (because much of the
PEARC’18, July 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
H. Neeman et al.
2
technical content that facilitators need is available via other
opportunities). The VR consists primarily of (a) summer weeklong
intensive workshops that provide both content and experiences in
facilitation, (b) biweekly conference calls that expand upon both
the kinds of topics introduced in the workshops and additional
content and experiences, (c) meetings at national conferences and
(d) a grant proposal writing apprenticeship. Current efforts focus
on extending the VR model to intermediate and advanced levels, as
well as disseminating a “train-the-trainers-of-trainers” approach to
teaching other organizations to conduct their own VR activities
within their own CI Facilitator communities, in order to expand the
VR's scale, scope, and reach. The VR program and its offshoots
have already served 336 CI professionals at 185 institutions across
the US and internationally. Current Virtual Residents are now
positioned to advance to the intermediate level and beyond, and
ultimately to become institutional and national CI leaders. This
paper will review accomplishments and share future plans.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Social and professional topics → Professional topics;
Computing profession; Computing occupations • Social and
professional topics → Professional topics; Computing education;
Adult education
KEYWORDS
Cyberinfrastructure workforce development, Cyberinfrastructure
facilitation
1 INTRODUCTION
Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is becoming increasingly difficult for
researchers and educators to exploit fully, because of:
• Ubiquity: A growing fraction of researchers are conducting
computing-intensive and data-intensive research, both
because of (a) the emergence of the data tsunami as a rich
source of research opportunities, and (b) a growing
requirement to combine computational and experimental
studies in investigations that would previously have been
primarily or exclusively experimental.
• System Complexity: CI systems are becoming more
complex, with increasingly hybrid parallelism (e.g.,
accelerators), deeper storage hierarchies (e.g., flash), and
more complex software stacks.
• Applicability: A much broader spectrum of research
disciplines have been learning to leverage CI, not only
physical sciences and engineering (which have long been CI
consumers), but also life sciences, social sciences and
humanities.
• Conceptual Distance: The most recent cohorts of student
researchers are often digital natives of handheld computing
(tablets and phones). Thus, their conceptual model of
computing is even further removed than past cohorts from
command line, Linux, batch, remote computing on a shared
resource.
The research and education workforce suffers from a critical deficit
of CI Facilitators, sometimes known as Advanced
Cyberinfrastructure Research & Education Facilitators (ACI-
REFs) [1]. These are CI professionals who work directly with
researchers and educators to advance the computing-intensive and
data-intensive aspects of their research and teaching. While
organizations such as those listed in section 3, below, are crucial
hubs of CI Facilitators, they are neither positioned nor budgeted to
teach key skills required by the many CI Facilitators that the
national research community urgently needs. In addition, the
complexity of the responsibilities of CI Facilitators (e.g., proposal
development, technology expertise, resource acquisition, national
CI milieu) exacerbates this deficit.
Among the key challenges that CI Facilitators face are:
• Spin-up Time: Unlike in the past, CI professionals are no
longer likely to have the luxury of time to establish the scope
of their duties and impact, but instead are required to be
productive immediately.
• Professional (Soft) Skills: To maximize their value to
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
researchers, CI Facilitators need practice and capability in
the strong interpersonal skills that constitute the equivalent of
bedside manner; e.g., communication (including listening),
team building, collaborating, motivating, organizing, trust-
building, de-escalating tension, cross-cultural bridging
(including social culture and inter- and intra-disciplinary
culture), inclusion, mentoring, and ultimately leadership.
Further, the national CI community has an ever-growing need for
institution-level CI leadership. Currently, via the US Newsranking
of national universities [2], a survey of these institutions’ websites
shows that almost all nationally ranked institutions have
centralized CI capability of some form, including 49 of the top 50
institutions, 96 of the top 100, 136 of the top 150 (91%) and 165
of the top 200 (83%) – and a significant number of non-PhD-
granting institutions are also pursuing these capabilities (for
example, 32 of past Virtual Residency (VR) workshop institutions
and 53 of XSEDE Campus Champion institutions). Many of these
centralized CI offerings were established recently, or are being
established now, so these institutions’ CI leaders need immediate
training and mentoring.
Also, because a sizable cohort of national CI leaders has been
nearing retirement, some of the current cohort of institutional CI
leaders may well be elevated to (a) national CI leadership roles
and/or (b) top-level institutional administrator positions. Thus, it is
vital to begin cultivating the next generation of institutional CI
leaders. A key pool of candidates for such vacancies will be in-
service CI professionals, especially experienced CI Facilitators,
who already understand the importance of adopting a service
posture. These candidates will need substantial training and
mentoring to prepare for CI leadership roles, because of the strong
necessity for institutional CI leaders who understand the
requirements and constraints of researchers across the full spectrum
of STEM (and non-STEM) disciplines, and how to work effectively
with them, so that they can manage teams of CI professionals via
leading practices.
Progress Update in the … Virtual Residency Program
PEARC’18, July 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
3
2 MOTIVATION
2.1 Indicators of Need
The federal government sees both a compelling need for CI
workforce development and a clear leadership role for the National
Science Foundation (NSF). For example, the National Strategic
Computing Initiative (NSCI) says, “… [the] NSF will play a central
role in the advancement of … [High Performance Computing
(HPC)] … workforce development” [3], and the NSCI Strategic
Plan [4] refers to workforce issues 26 times in 29 pages.
CI skills are increasingly crucial to STEM research. As the
National Security Agency - Department of Energy Technical
Meeting on High Performance Computing reported, “Workforce
development is a major concern in HPC and a priority for
supporting NSCI Objectives …. We must inspire a new generation
of students to master the skills required for HPC ….” [5] However,
doing so increasingly requires the intervention of CI Facilitators to
help investigators achieve optimal research productivity.
As for CI Facilitators in particular, as far back as 2003, the
Atkins Report pointed out the need for “professionals who are
trained to understand and address the human factors dimensions of
working across disciplines, cultures, and institutions ….” [6]
Michael and Maas report that “[f]ull-time [CI] facilitators act at the
front line of building relationships between computing providers
and research communities with specific goals and activities that
exceed the ability of traditional documentation-and-help-desk
models.” [7]
Interest in CI workforce issues is not limited to the US. For
example, the Council of the European Union has stated, “There is
only a small workforce available that has the adequate educational
background and is well trained in HPC especially in parallel
programming. In addition, scientists that maintain computational
tools and application codes often do not have an attractive career
path. This hinders exploitation of HPC in research and industry. By
2020 the computing power available in today's most performant
HPC systems will be available on desktop systems. A well trained
workforce capable of efficiently using this computing power is
essential.” [8]
2.2 The Four Facings
The CI professional community has informally been adopting a
model sometimes known as the Four Facings: (1) system-facing,
(2) user-facing, (3) software/data-facing, and (4)
sponsor/stakeholder-facing. A typical CI Facilitator will have a
strong user-facing role, but it is common for them to also have roles
with other facings as well. For example, at many institutions, the
same person will serve as both CI Facilitator and cluster system
administrator (system-facing); other CI Facilitators have split
appointments that include a software engineering role (software-
facing) or a leadership role (sponsor/stakeholder-facing). For
example, co-author H. Neeman has had user-facing,
sponsor/stakeholder-facing and software-facing roles, and co-
author D. Brunson has had system-facing, user-facing and
sponsor/stakeholder-facing roles.
3 RELATED ACTIVITIES
The groups and activities below are engaged in crucial endeavors
that contribute to developing and shaping the national and
international CI professional community. However, none of them
are focused on, nor budgeted to provide, the kind of deep, intensive
training that the VR is designed for, especially at national scale.
3.1 Clemson-led Advanced Cyberinfrastructure
Research & Education Facilitators
The Clemson-led Advanced CI Research & Education Facilitators
(ACI-REF) program [1] (NSF grant no. 1341935) advances
research via a national network of CI Facilitators. This multi-year
grant is now in a no cost extension as it transitions into post-grant
activities, including engaging with CaRC (see 3.2) to promote
further adoption of CI Facilitation. Co-author H. Neeman, VR lead,
was an (ultimately unfunded) collaborator on the original ACI-REF
“Phase 1” proposal. This project has neither a mission nor funding
to provide national-scale CI Facilitator training, but all Phase 1 and
Phase 2 institutions have participated in the VR.
3.2 Campus Research Computing Consortium
The Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRC) [9] is an
NSF Research Coordination Network project (NSF grant no.
1620695) – and an outgrowth of the Clemson-led ACI-REF
project (see section 3.1) – in which a group of nearly three dozen
campuses are collaborating to address the massive growth in
demand for local research computing, by sharing, collaborating,
and developing best practices. CaRC has neither a mission nor
funding to provide large scale workforce development for CI
professionals, but almost all CaRC institutions have participated in
the VR. Co-author Neeman is a Co-PI of CaRC; co-author Brunson
co-chairs the CaRC People Network.
3.3 Campus Champions
The 400+ Campus Champions [10] at 200+ US academic and
research-focused institutions help their local researchers to use CI,
especially large scale and advanced computing (that is, most
Champions do CI Facilitation as at least a portion of their duties).
Champions peer-mentor each other, to learn to be more effective as
CI professionals. The Campus Champion community includes: (a)
a very active mailing list where Champions exchange ideas and
help each other solve problems; (b) regular conference calls for
learning what's happening both among the Campus Champions and
at the national level in CI; (c) significant participation at national
conferences (e.g., 21% of PEARC2017 participants, ~100
participants at SC17). Many Campus Champions have participated
in VR activities: of the 185 institutions that have participated in VR
activities so far (see section 4.5), 137 of those institutions were
then, or have since become, Champion institutions, constituting
74% of all VR institutions and 55% of all Campus Champion
institutions. Thus, the VR complements Campus Champion
activities, providing CI Facilitator training that the Campus
Champions need but that the Champion program is neither
positioned nor budgeted to provide. Co-authors Neeman and
Brunson are joint co-managers of the XSEDE Campus Engagement
program, which includes the Champions.
PEARC’18, July 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
H. Neeman et al.
4
3.4 CyberAmbassadors
This 2017 NSF CyberTraining project (NSF grant no. 1730137) is
developing an open source curriculum on interpersonal
communication and mentoring skills for CI professionals. This
training is targeted at giving CI professionals the skills they need to
communicate effectively and to strengthen very diverse teams of
researchers. The first objective for the program is to develop a
curriculum that builds professional skills (communications,
teamwork, leadership) within the context of large scale,
multidisciplinary computational research. The pedagogical
approach is grounded in constructivism and socioculturism, and
will combine practice training exercises with examples from real
multidisciplinary research. The second objective is to pilot,
evaluate and revise the curriculum with existing CI professional
groups (e.g., the VR). The third objective is to develop a curriculum
to “train the trainers.” This final step is designed to exponentially
grow the impact of this curriculum, by preparing a diverse team of
facilitators who can offer professional communication skills
training at their own institutions and via regional or national events.
As the 2017 VR workshop did, future VR activities will be able to
leverage the results of the CyberAmbassadors project, extending its
scope and lifespan. Co-author Colbry is CyberAmbassadors PI.
3.5 Linux Clusters Institute (LCI)
The Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) [11] holds workshops on HPC
system administration [12], so far at the introductory and
intermediate levels, with an aspiration to add an advanced level.
These workshops have been extremely successful, typically
attracting 20-40 pre-service and in-service HPC system
administrators per workshop, demonstrating a strong national need
for this training. Unlike the VR, the LCI focuses on system-facing
CI professionals, not user-facing professionals. Neeman has been
on the LCI steering committee for over a decade, has hosted 3 LCI
workshops, and has taught at several.
3.6 SIGHPC Education Chapter
SIGHPC Education is a virtual chapter of the ACM’s Special
Interest Group in HPC. It recently merged with the International
HPC Training Consortium (IHPCTC), whose purpose is the
promotion of interest in, and knowledge of, applications of HPC.
Their focus is on promoting leading practices for HPC training, but
they do not provide such training themselves. Brunson is an at-large
board member; both Brunson and Neeman served on the IHPCTC
organizing committee, Brunson since 2016, Neeman since 2014.
3.7 Software and Data Carpentry
The Carpentries are an international volunteer organization that has
run hundreds of hands-on workshops on research computing skills
that so far have served over 22,000 researchers worldwide. These
computational skills are often overlooked in formal scientific
curricula. The Carpentries have demonstrated the effectiveness of
“training the trainers” in informal education at large scale, but with
a focus on training the trainers of researchers, emphasizing
technical skills and pedagogy, not training the trainers of CI
Facilitators. Brunson is a longtime instructor and is participating in
the design of HPC Carpentry.
3.8 Coalition for Academic Scientific
Computation
Members of this non-profit organization are primarily institutional
and national CI leaders from across the US. The focus of this
organization most closely aligns with CI leadership. CASC [13] is
neither budgeted nor positioned to take on a substantial teaching or
training role, but significant peer mentoring emerges from CASC
activities. Co-authors Neeman, Brunson, Colbry, H. Al-Azzawi, S.
Gesing and C. Mizumoto are at CASC institutions.
3.9 Science Gateways Community Institute
The SGCI [14], founded in 2016, offers a workforce development
service area with internships, mentoring and travel funding to
conferences for undergraduate and graduate students, connections
to the Young Professional Network, and support for gateway-
related career paths. While science gateways form a subset of CI
software, the diversity of expertise needed has substantial overlap
with the expertise needed by the CI workforce in general. The
efforts undertaken via SGCI complement the VR. Co-author
Gesing is an SGCI Co-PI.
3.10 United Kingdom Research Software
Engineer Association
UKRSEA [15], which has 20 participating universities, was
founded to support Research Software Engineers, who focus on
reproducibility, reusability, and accuracy of data analysis and
applications created for research [16]. UKRSEA’s goal is to foster
career paths for academic RSEs and to ensure that the role of
academic RSEs is recognized and rewarded. RSE associations are
also forming in the US and Australia. UKRSEA’s mission is quite
different from, and complementary to, the VR, focusing on
software-facing CI professionals instead of user-facing. Co-author
Gesing is one of the initiators of the new US RSE Association.
3.11 Working Towards Sustainable Software for
Science Practice and Experiences
WSSSPE [17] started in 2013 and is a community-driven
organization focused on sustainability of research software. Their
workshops – typically two per year on different continents – are
organized as interactive working groups for discussions, with
actions beyond the workshops, and anyone interested can
contribute [18]. Thus, the format of the workshops differs
significantly from the concept of the VR, even though the target
groups have considerable overlap, though WSSSPE has more of a
software-facing mission. Gesing is one of the organizers.
3.12 US Research Software Sustainability
Institute
URSSI [19] has been funded by NSF in 2018. Its goal is an institute
focused on research software and on building the community. The
vision of the institute is to improve how individuals and teams
function, and to advance research software and the STEM research
it supports. Thus, URSSI is complementary to the VR. Gesing is
Co-PI.
Progress Update in the … Virtual Residency Program
PEARC’18, July 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
5
4 VIRTUAL RESIDENCY COMPONENTS
4.1 VR Workshops (Introductory)
Virtual Residency (VR) introductory workshops [20] have so far
been held in the summers of 2015, 2016 and 2017 [21, 22, 23] at
the University of Oklahoma (OU), and VR leadership assisted the
University of California System to develop and execute a mini-
workshop in spring 2017 [24] (with another planned for 2018 [25]).
Introductory workshop sessions have had several themes:
1. Understanding & Working with Real Researchers
a. Introduction to research CI consulting
b. How to give a CI tour, and why
c. Effective communication: how to talk to researchers
about their research
d. Real researchers present their research
e. CI user support
f. Faculty: tenure, promotion, reward system
g. How to do an intake interview
h. CI facilitation practicum (“speed dating”)
i. Exploring the faculty entrepreneurial mindset (2016)
j. Best practices and lessons learned from the ACI-REF
Phase 1 project (2016)
k. Ongoing assistance of researchers (2016)
l. Creating and evaluating training workshops (2016)
m. Creating effective CI documentation and other learning
materials (2016)
n. Research data management (2016)
o. Engaging undergraduates in HPC (2017)
p. CyberAmbassadors: Advanced communication skills
training for CI professionals (2017)
q. Collecting and processing metrics for evaluating
facilitation (2017)
r. Stories from the trenches
2. Technical
a. Deploying community codes
b. Debugging, benchmarking and tuning
c. Using videoconferencing and collaboration technologies
for consulting (2015)
d. How to design a cluster (2016, 2017)
e. Managing research data with Globus software-as-a-
service (2017)
f. Advanced networking content (2015, 2016)
i. OpenFlow
ii. Open Daylight
iii. The software in Software Defined Networking
3. The Cyberinfrastructure Milieu
a. Finding and Provisioning Remote Resources (XSEDE,
OSG) (2015)
b. The CI Milieu (2016, 2017)
c. Working effectively with vendors [panel with vendor
representatives] (2017)
d. Experiences with purchasing, facilities etc (2017)
e. Science Gateways Community Institute (2017)
f. Bringing Software Carpentry to your institution (2017)
4. Grant Proposal Writing
a. Writing grant proposals [not CI-specific]
b. The shifting landscape of CI funding opportunities
c. So you want to write a CI proposal
NOTES
• For those sessions for which no year is listed, each such
session was held in all three years.
• “Speed dating:” Real researchers rotate among subsets of VR
workshop participants for intake interview practice.
• Advanced networking topics were included in the 2015-16
introductory workshops, which were funded by OU’s NSF
Campus CI Engineer grant; since then, other opportunities
for learning advanced research networking topics have
arisen, so the VR has discontinued this topic area.
• A more detailed description of 2015 sessions is in [20].
As the topic list shows, the emphasis of the VR introductory
workshops has been primarily on professional (soft) skills, not deep
technical knowledge, because technical training is available from a
variety of other sources, whereas no other organization in the world
focuses on professional (soft) skills specific to CI Facilitation.
For the VR workshops, the mix of session topics, and the
content of these sessions, has been developed in large part by the
Virtual Residents themselves. In particular, for the very first (2015)
VR introductory workshop, the curriculum was primarily
developed and delivered by OSCER and OU Information
Technology staff (with a few guest speakers). However, for the
2016-17 VR workshops, most of the curricula and content were
developed by Virtual Residents, during the biweekly VR calls (see
section 4.2, below), and these sessions were delivered primarily by
VR workshop participants (including co-authors Neeman,
Brunson, Colbry and Gesing)
So far, the VR introductory workshops have had 315
participants, from 177 institutions in 49 US states, 2 US territories
and 5 other countries on 4 continents. Of the 315 VR workshop
participants, 211 (67%) have been remote only; the remainder have
been onsite for at least one workshop.
4.2 VR Conference Calls
The VR includes biweekly conference calls among Virtual
Residents, which have been quite popular: to date, 161 people have
participated, from 102 institutions in 42 US states and 4 other
countries. On these calls, the Virtual Residents discuss topics of
interest (sometimes via a lightning talk), plan VR workshops and
other activities, and engage in peer mentoring. The Virtual
Residents’ enthusiasm for the VR calls is also confirmed by the
most recent Doodle poll for VR call timeslots, which had 170+ poll
participants (49% of Virtual Residents).
4.3 VR Meetings
The Virtual Residents have met as a group every year at the
SC supercomputing conference:
• At SC15, there were multiple meetings, focused primarily on
recruiting for the 2016 workshop.
• At SC16, there was one meeting, split primarily between (a)
mechanisms for recruiting vendor sponsorships for future
events, and (b) recruiting lightning talk speakers and topics
for future VR calls.
• At SC17, there was one meeting, most social, focused on a
“swag hunt” at vendor booths at the exhibition.
PEARC’18, July 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
H. Neeman et al.
6
4.4 Grant Proposal Writing Apprenticeship
Grant proposal writing is a crucial component of the academic (and
other not-for-profit) research process, and therefore is a very
important skill for such researchers. Thus, it can be strategically
valuable for CI Facilitators to learn this same skill. Advantages to
CI Facilitators of learning how to write grant proposals can include
(a) significantly enhanced credibility with researchers (especially
faculty and research staff), and, of course, (b) obtaining funding for
additional or enhanced research computing resources (whether
physical or human), for the benefit of the research constituencies
that the CI Facilitators serve.
Therefore, in spring 2017, the Virtual Residency program
embarked on an additional activity, with zero funding, as a follow-
on arising from a combination of the VR under OU’s Campus CI
Engineer grant and the XSEDE Campus Champions program. This
activity’s goal was to teach CI Facilitators how to write grant
proposals, by writing a grant proposal together, so that the
participants would be able to learn, from experienced PIs, not only
the basic structures associated with grant proposal writing, but also
how to think strategically about proposals and projects. A key
impetus was the fact that, at a number of institutions, CI leaders
may be expected not only to write grant proposals (especially but
not exclusively for CI resources), but to get these proposals funded
successfully.
Originally, the Grant Proposal Writing Apprenticeship’s
approach was to develop an NSF workshop proposal at under
$50,000, to fund a few intermediate-level VR summer workshops.
A one-page precis of the intended workshop proposal was
developed by the Apprenticeship, and was sent to the relevant NSF
program officer. Feedback on the one-page precis suggested that a
full NSF CyberTraining [26] proposal, with significantly expanded
scope and scale, would be appropriate, and this became the new
focus of the Apprenticeship.
The CyberTraining proposal (see section 5) was developed by
the Grant Proposal Writing Apprenticeship team over a period of
many months, starting in summer 2017 (and submitted in mid-
February 2018). Titled “The Cyberinfrastructure Leadership and
Expanded Facilitation Virtual Residency” (CLEFVR, pronounced
“clever”), the proposal was developed as an entirely volunteer
effort. The CLEFVR proposal writing team had a total of 67
participants, from 52 institutions in 31 US states and territories and
1 other country, including 10 Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs),
12 non-PhD-granting institutions, and 19 institutions in 13
Established Program for the Stimulation of Competitive Research
(EPSCoR) jurisdictions. After the CLEFVR proposal was
submitted, the Apprenticeship went on hiatus; when comparable
future proposal writing opportunities arise, the Apprenticeship
leadership hope to repeat it, time permitting.
4.5 VR Uptake
To date, Virtual Residency activities have had a total of 336
participants, from 185 institutions in 49 US states and 2 US
territories as well as 6 other countries on 4 continents. This has
included:
(a) Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs): 28 institutions (15% of
all VR institutions);
(b) Non-PhD-granting (academic) institutions: 33 institutions
(18% of all VR institutions);
(c) EPSCoR: 59 institutions in 25 of 27 EPSCoR jurisdictions
(32% of all VR institutions, 62% of all EPSCoR doctoral-
granting institutions);
(d) Campus Champion institutions: 137 of 248 Campus
Champion institutions (74% of all VR institutions, 55% of all
Campus Champion institutions);
(e) CaRC: 32 of 35 CaRC institutions (91% of CaRC
institutions, 17% of VR institutions);
(f) CASC: 61 of 84 CASC institutions (75% of all CASC
institutions, 33% of all VR institutions).
5 FUTURE WORK
If funded, the CLEFVR project will focus on (a) providing
informal end-to-end training and professional development for a
national population of CI Facilitators and institutional CI leaders,
from institutions across the US, and (b) establishing leading
practices for such training at scale, via:
1. Training: Workshops, at the introductory, intermediate and
advanced levels, on how to be a CI Facilitator and how to be
an institutional CI leader, using the workshop approach that
the team has already successfully delivered at the
introductory level.
2. Meta-training: A “train the trainers of trainers” program to
recruit and train organizations nationwide on how to run such
workshops, as a mechanism (i) to ensure sustainability and
(ii) to scale up impact.
3. Mentoring:
a. a mentorship program for in-service CI Facilitators,
including a matchmaking service to match new CI
Facilitators with experienced and former CI Facilitators;
b. a national CI leadership academy to establish formal
mentoring relationships between senior CI leaders and
emerging CI leaders and to train the emerging leaders
on how to shape the national CI agenda, already
separately funded.
4. Materials: Modules that are reproducible and extensible,
made available to the national community, including closed
captioned streaming video recordings of workshop sessions.
5. Evaluation and assessment, both formative and summative,
to establish leading practices for these activities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was partially supported by National Science Foundation
grants no. 1440783 (“CC*IIE Engineer: A Model for Advanced
Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitators”) and
1548562 (“XSEDE 2.0: Integrating, Enabling and Enhancing
National Cyberinfrastructure with Expanding Community
Involvement”). Portions of the text of this paper were originally
developed for various grant proposals and grant reports, and are
used with permission of the Principal Investigators, including some
of this paper’s authors. The CI User Support session was originally
Progress Update in the … Virtual Residency Program
PEARC’18, July 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
7
designed by Mehmet (Memo) Belgin of the Georgia Institute of
Technology and used with his permission. Several of the sessions
were presented by guest lecturers, to whom the authors are deeply
grateful.
REFERENCES
[1]
Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Research & Education Facilitators website.
https://aciref.org/
[2]
US News National Univerity Ranking. https://www.usnews.com/best-
colleges/rankings/national-universities?int=994d08.
[3]
B. Obama, 2015: “Executive Order – Creating a National Strategic
Computing Initiative.” https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
office/2015/07/29/executive-order-creating-national-strategic-computing-
initiative.
[4]
National Strategic Computing Initiative Strategic Plan.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/
NSCI%20Strategic%20Plan.pdf
[5]
“U.S. Leadership in High Performance Computing (HPC),” December 1,
2016. Meeting report from the NSA-DOE Technical Meeting on High
Performance Computing, Baltimore, MD, September 28-29, 2016.
https://www.nitrd.gov/nitrdgroups/images/b/b4/NSA_DOE_HPC_TechMe
etingReport.pdf .
[6]
D. E. Atkins, K. K. Droegemeier, S. I. Feldman, H. Garcia-Molina, M. L.
Klein, D. G. Messerschmitt, P. Messina, J. P. Ostriker and M. H. Wright,
2003: “Revolution
izing Science and Engineering Through
Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-
Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure.”
https://www.nsf.gov/cise/sci/reports/atkins.pdf
[7]
L. Michael and B. Maas, 2016: “Research Computing Facilitators: The
Missing Human Link in Needs-Based Research Cyberinfrastructure.”
ECAR Research Bulletin.
[8]
Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, The
Council, “The
European Economic and Social Committee and the
Committee of the Regions: High-Performance Computing: Europe’s place
in a Global Race.” European Commission, Brussels, 15.2.2012 COM(2012)
45 final.
[9]
Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRC) website.
https://carcc.org
[10]
XSEDE Campus Champions webpage.
https://www.xsede.org/community-engagement/campus-champions/
[11]
Linux Clusters Institute (LCI) website.
http://www.linuxclustersinstitute.org/
[12]
D. Akin, M. Belgin, T. A. Bouvet, N. C. Bright, S. Harrell, B. Haymore, M.
Jennings, R. Knepper, D. LaPine, F. C. Liu, A. Maji, H. Neeman, R.
Reynolds, A. H. Sherman, M. Showerman, J. Tillotson, J. Towns, G. Turner
and B. Zimmerman, 2017: “Linux Clusters Institute Workshops: Building
the HPC and Research Computing Systems Professionals Workforce.”
HPCSYSPROS'17: Proceedings of the HPC Systems Professionals
Workshop 2017, article 4. DOI: 10.1145/3155105.3155108.
[13]
Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) website.
http://casc.org
[14]
Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) website.
https://sciencegateways.org
[15]
United Kingdom Research Software Engineer Association website.
http://rse.ac.uk/
[16]
A. Brett, M. Croucher, R. Haines, S. Hettrick, J. Hetherington, M. Stillwell
and C. Wyatt, 2017: “Research Software Engineers: State of the Nation
Report 2017.” Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.495360.
[17]
Working Towards Sustainable Software for Science Practice and
Experiences (WSSSPE) website. http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/
[18]
D. S. Katz, K. Niemeyer, S. Gesing, L. Hwang, W. Bangerth, S. Hettrick,
R. Idaszak, J. Salac, N. Chue Hong, S. Nunez-Corrales, A. Allen, R. S.
Geiger, J. Miller, E. Chen, A. Dubey, P. Lago, 2018: “Fourth Workshop on
Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE4).”
Journal of Open Research Software, accepted.
[19]
US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) website.
http://urssi.us/
[20]
H. Neeman, A. Bergstrom, D. Brunson, C. Ganote, Z. Gray, B. Guilfoos, R.
Kalescky, E. Lemley, B. G. Moore, S. K. Ramadugu, A. Romanella, J.
Rush, A. H. Sherman, B. Stengel and D. Voss, 2016: “The Advanced
Cyberinfrastructure Research and Education Facilitators Virtual Residency:
Toward a National Cyberinfrastructure Workforce.” Proc. XSEDE'16,
article 57. DOI: 10.1145/2949550.2949584.
[21]
ACI-REF Virtual Residency Workshop 2015 webpage.
http://www.oscer.ou.edu/acirefvirtres2015/
[22]
ACI-REF Virtual Residency Workshop 2016 webpage.
http://www.oscer.ou.edu/acirefvirtres2016/
[23]
ACI-REF Virtual Residency Workshop 2017 webpage.
http://www.oscer.ou.edu/acirefvirtres2017/
[24]
2017 University of California Research Facilitators Workshop.
http://research-it.ucsd.edu/about/2017workshop.html
[25]
2018 University of California Research Facilitators Workshop.
http://research-it.ucsd.edu/2018workshop.html
[26]
National Science Foundation Training-based Workforce Development for
Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (CyberTraining) program webpage.
https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505342
