NSF Vision, Strategy and Plans for Research Cyberinfrastructure (Invited Presentation)

The NSF was established by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. Its stated mission is "To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense."  NSF accomplishes this mission through support of academic basic research.   It champions research and education across all fields of science and education.  The practice of science and engineering is changing allowing advances in fundamental understanding that were previously not possible.   Often today’s research is highly interdisciplinary, team-oriented, global, and data intensive, with dynamic work and data flows that are increasingly integrated with technology.   This technology presents new opportunities and new challenges to advancing research frontiers:  new and more powerful instruments; ubiquitous connectivity; increasingly capable computational and data science.   The nation’s research community is increasingly enabled by an agile, highly interoperable, and continually advancing cyberinfrastructure.  This talk will discuss NSF’s vision, strategy, challenges and approaches to advancing and supporting Research Cyberinfrastructure.  It will encompass technical, human and operating model considerations relevant to science and engineering research.   The talk will describe the current portfolio of investments in High Performance Computing, Data, Software, Networking and Workforce Development as well as areas of planning and community input.  It will illustrate some of the recent research advances that were, in part, enabled by the current cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.