Scientists and engineers stand on the brink of new opportunities to enable and accelerate scientific discoveries by exploiting access to an unprecedented scale and diversity of high-end digital resources and services. To better facilitate the use of such resources for transformational science and engineering discoveries, the PIs have proposed the design for a world-class, comprehensive cyberinfrastructure (CI) of advanced digital services: the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). XSEDE will enable researchers to use XSEDE resources and services directly, from their personal and campus resources, from other high-end centers and cyberinfrastructure resources, and via science gateways and discovery environments. The XSEDE Partnership will be led by NCSA, TACC, NICS and PSC, and includes partners who complement their strengths with expertise in CI architecture, systems engineering, and program management. Driven by a comprehensive set of community science requirements, the team will design a plan for the full XSEDE architecture of diverse digital services for enabling end-to-end research. It will also plan a highly coordinated user support program, including advanced user support and a multi-pronged training, education and outreach program, offering an array of services from technology experts to assist all levels of users and to recruit and prepare future users. XSEDE will be designed to interface with other CI projects and resources, and to evolve to meet emerging requirements and technology opportunities. The resulting plan will enable the deployment and operation of XSEDE to transform the conduct of computational science from use of individual resources for discrete tasks to enabling end-to-end science in a complete, comprehensive, integrated environment of extraordinary capability that enables transformative scientific breakthroughs in the next five years. The XSEDE plan will be shared with science and technology researchers and educators via workshops and direct communications. This will enable integration of research and education with leading applications teams and tool developers by increasing their awareness of current technologies and best practices through communication and curriculum content, while stimulating development of needed capabilities and technologies for addressing science community needs. The XSEDE plan will explore ways to increase and broaden participation by working with under-represented faculty and students among the current community of high-end practitioners as well as recruiting and engaging even larger numbers of under-represented individuals.
