The Center for Research Computing’s Sandra Gesing Collaborates to Improve Usability of Science Gateways Across Domains
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year $15 million grant to a collaborative team led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego to establish a Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) to accelerate the development and application of highly functional, sustainable science gateways that address the needs of researchers across the full spectrum of NSF directorates.
“Gateways foster collaborations and the exchange of ideas among researchers and can democratize access, providing broad access to resources sometimes unavailable to those who are not at leading research institutions.” said Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, SDSC associate director and principal investigator for the project.
The new SGCI award brings together expertise from a wide range of partner universities and institutions including Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina; Indiana University; University of Notre Dame; Purdue University; the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas, Austin; and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Sandra Gesing, Computational Scientist at the Center for Research Computing and Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and part of the SGCI collaborative team, will support the promotion of national and international communication between gateway developers.
“My research has focused for 10 years on science gateways – also known as virtual research environments or virtual laboratories – and I am thrilled to be part of the SGCI. We envision the institute as a central contact, support and information point for the community and for national as well as international collaborations on science gateways,” said Gesing. “With well-designed measures we aim at improving the usability and sustainability of science gateways and thus enhancing the reusability of scientific methods and reproducibility of scientific research.”
The SGCI is one of two major NSF awards announced today to establish the Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2) that will help increase the usability and sustainability of computer science tools.
“The Institutes will ultimately impact thousands of researchers, making it possible to perform investigations that would otherwise be impossible and expanding the community of scientists able to perform research on the nation’s cyberinfrastructure,” said Rajiv Ramnath, program director in the division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at NSF.
Th full NSF S2I2 award announcement is available here.
The work is funded via NSF award number is ACI-1547611 and more information about SGCI is available here.
Read the full story here.
Originally published by Kallie O’Connell at conductorshare.nd.edu on July 29, 2016.