This award is to support a preliminary and a final workshop on Cyberscience Grand Challenges and Implications for Cyberinfrastructure. CyberScience is a revolutionary new approach to scientifc discovery that begins with the development of quantifable models, and then develops the algorithms, software, and simulation tools required to provide unique insights into problems in science and engineering. Experiment and theory are then complemented in a novel and essential way by computational modeling and simulation. Advances in cyberscience, accelerated by advances in cyberinfrastructure, have the potential to usher in a new age of scientifc discovery that will greatly aid in the solution of many of the important Grand Challenge Problems facing our nation. There is an urgent need to take stock of the state of modern cyberscience, to assess the needs, barriers, and opportunities associated with the Grand Challenges problems facing humanity over the coming decade,and define the resulting implications for next-generation cyberinfrastructure, including hardware,networking, storage, software, algorithms, data, visualization, and educational programs. The pair of one-day workshops that will bring together leading figures in the U.S. computational science and engineering community, with the ultimate goal of producing a report identifying and articulating the critical impacts of the scientific grand challenge problems of the coming decade on future cyberinfrastructure. The first workshop will be held in late summer 2009, in the early stages of the group's deliberations. The second workshop will be held in spring 2010, with the goal of finalizing the report. The specific aims of the workshops are to (1) develop a thorough understanding of the requirements of modern science and engineering applications on the cyberinfrastructure that must be deployed to address the scientific Grand Challenges of the coming decade; 2) identify mechanisms for facilitating collaborations within distributed computational science communities to address complex problems that are beyond the reach of more traditional approaches; and(3) produce a set of well-considered recommendations on ideas for new programs to more tightly couple advanced problem-solving in science and engineering with continuing investments in cyberinfrastructure.
