Software is critical for all branches of science and engineering and is a key component of the emerging global cyberinfrastructure. In parallel, science and engineering are becoming more collaborative, where multi-investigator teams with a diversity of expertise are required to efficiently attack increasingly complex fundamental questions and processes, on a global scale; including societal issues such as health, energy, weather, disaster mitigation (earthquake, flood), and the environment. Solving problems on a global scale requires both that scientists work together and that their software and related cyberinfrastructure interoperate.
NSF recognizes the importance of the development of software and software institutes and has established a solicitation to provide opportunities for the U.S. research communities to their development. The National Natural Science Foundation of China similarly recognizes the significance of software development for science and engineering studies, and has supported research in this area, but there has been little communication between software research communities in the United States and China. This award will support a series of two workshops and intervening interactions by funding a group of approximately 15 U.S. researchers to interact with a similar number of researchers in the People?s Republic of China supported by the National Natural Science Foundation China, to explore three areas of software development: trusted software, extreme scale software, and architectures and processes for emerging infrastructure, in order to expand collaboration between the U.S. and China software researchers in these areas.
The first workshop will be held in Beijing in Fall 2011; a second workshop will be held in San Diego in Spring 2012. Between the workshops small groups of participants and graduate students will meet to develop ideas from the first workshop, to be presented at the second workshop, and to be pursued after the end of this funded activity. The success of this activity will be measured in the research collaborations that persist beyond the framework of this activity.
The intellectual merit of this activity is to determine through practice if this process can accelerate the formation of substantive, bi-lateral, peer-reviewed research programs. The broader impact will be to open the door, widely, to U.S.-China collaborations in some critical areas of software. The transformative impact will be a model of how other international research collaborations in cyberinfrastructure can be carried out to break down significant barriers between researchers in the world?s two largest economies.
in 2011, the Royal Society concluded that The architecture of science is changing to become more collaborative where the "primary driver of most collaboration is the scientists themselves. In developing their research and finding answers, scientists are seeking to work with the best people, institutions and equipment which complement their research, wherever they may be."[KNN][1] This award funded a workshop series to catalyze international collaborative research in select areas of computer science that include computing at extreme scales (tens of thousands to millions of processors), next-generation computing architecture (like clouds and social networks), and whether or not a computer program performs as claimed by its developer (so-called trustworthy computing). The intellectual merit of the workshop series was a practical experiment to discover if it was both possible and valuable to bring together scientists from different cultures and backgrounds and enable them to discover common ground. When proposed, positive outcome of the experiment would be measured as the submission of three or more follow-on collaborative research proposals to both the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) that would be subject to peer-review for intellectual quality and follow-on impact. In other words, instead of simply discussing collaboration, could the participants discover and develop new and substantive research in some or all target research areas. At the end of a two-year period five different teams completed the process of discovering the potential value of working together, developing worthy research, and submitting those ideas for peer review to both NSF and NSFC. While not all of these follow-on proposals were eventually funded, those that were will continue to develop new technologies and techniques well beyond the scope of the original workshop series. The longer term societal impact will be that, in areas where common ground is both possible and beneficial, practical methods can be employed to enable scientists to work together and across borders. This improves the pace of scientific progress and improves fundamental understanding. [1] Knowledge, networks and nations (KNN): Global scientific collaborations in the 21st century. The Royal Society. ISBN: 978-0-85403-890-9, March 2011
