This project seeks to prepare a science and engineering workforce for full citizenship in the evolving world of cyber-enabled research and education. This goal will be accomplished via an Embedded Immersive Engagement (EIE) effort in the context of the Open Science Grid (OSG). The work is guided by the observation that broad adoption of cyberinfrastructure concepts and technologies requires an embedded effort to develop the skills of students, faculty, and IT organizations of the campuses that host them. Both cyberinfrastructure providers and consumers must be immersed in building and delivering end-to-end processing and data management capabilities needed for scientific discovery. Moreover, scientific computing must be expanded out of the existing center of gravity to create a truly national shared cyberinfrastructure, whereby scientists and educators more broadly can experience the benefits of new computational resources as well as new levels of collaboration they afford. The project entails a three-year plan of work that extends the pedagogical methodologies of Embedded Immersive Engagement (EIE) for shared cyberinfrastructure (4CI). Through the project's model of EIE-4CI, cyberinfrastructure experts are embedded within research and education teams at different sites to accomplish the following: (1) Bring at least six new research and education teams to full production utilization of available distributed cyberinfrastructure resources; (2) Enable at least six university campuses to operate a production quality shared distributed infrastructure across multiple facilities using common middleware; (3) Establish the knowledge, experience, documentation, and training capabilities to significantly lower the bar for use of and/or contribution to a shared distributed facility; (4) Provide cyberinfrastructure consumers and providers with hands-on technical knowledge, tools and methodologies to continue as full contributors to cyberinfrastructure beyond this project; and, (5) Explore the issues and develop best practices to support a highly scalable model of remotely embedding cyberinfrastructure experts into research teams. The project's EIE-4CI methodology will result in a cyber-enabled research and education platform at the campuses and with the teams involved, leaving behind hands-on cyberinfrastructure knowledge and expertise at the local site as well as creating a viral mechanism for extending that knowledge and expertise to new sites beyond those directly engaged in the project. The results are thus inherently replicable and sustainable by virtue of the project design.
