Collaborative Research: SCIPE: CyberInfrastructure Professionals InnoVating and brOadening the adoption of advanced Technologies (CI PIVOT)

Science and engineering research and education have dynamic and growing needs encompassing new technology requirements from physics-based simulation to artificial intelligence and using computing through workflows spanning local computing resources to the public cloud. The number of cyberinfrastructure (CI) professionals critical to support these activities within the research enterprise at higher education institutions is too few and, frequently, not well-integrated into regional and national efforts that would serve as sources of innovation.

This project, CI PIVOT, will address these workforce issues by creating several teams of CI professionals trained with tailored, best-of-breed educational materials who will contribute, collaborate, and co-create as part of local, regional, and national research partnerships. These partnerships will promote the progress of science and result in significant advances in the fields of geoscience, engineering, and social behavioral and economic sciences.

CI PIVOT will further contribute to the national interest of developing a globally-competitive, diverse workforce and broadening participation through innovative project activities.

The team's goals include: 1) enabling cross-institutional partnerships, sustainability, and promotion of CIPs as valuable and valued research partners; 2) supporting and advancing national research projects; 3) building a scalable workforce development in geoscience, engineering, and social behavioral and economic sciences for the advancement of trustworthy computational science; and 4) lowering the barrier to entry for building institutional research (support) capacity for institutions beyond our own. To actualize these goals, CI PIVOT will employ programmatic activities prioritizing inclusiveness and broadening representation.

These activities consist of listening tours (stakeholder interviews and requirements gathering), co-envisioning retreats (team self-selected goal and best practice setting), future-creating workshops (method to strategically evolve the program for stakeholders and future CI professionals), and computational carpentries (workshops promoting computational skills development). The CI PIVOT program will train CI professionals in various areas, including tools to manage workflows using advanced cyberinfrastructure, parallel, and accelerated code development, workflow performance analysis and optimization, advanced cybersecurity, machine and deep learning techniques, and cloud workflow orchestration.

Through productive collaborations and partnerships, CI PIVOT will advance science with technical publications relevant to geoscience, engineering, or social behavioral and economic sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.