1. Executive Summary

Theory & experimentation have been supplemented over the last deacde by modeling and data. All those foundational pillars of science require a correspondingly robust Research CyberInfrastructure (RCI). RCI capability at UCI is well below that of other R1 universities and campus research & scholarship is already impaired by the lack of investment in Storage, Computation, & Staff. Without substantial new investment in this area we will increasingly fall behind and lose the ability to even sustain current levels of research, much less accelerate and expand it.

To support the competitiveness of UCI researchers in the evolving cyber environment, our vision is to:

  • Change how RCI is coordinated, funded, and delivered, by placing the responsibility for its support, etc under a separate organization, the UCI RCI Center (UCI-RCIC). [I personally hate this name and all names containing CyberInfrastructure, but…] In order to concentrate attention and responsiveness in this area, we propose to place RCI direction under the control of its end users. That is, to break the current Reseach Computing Support out of OIT and establish it under the direction of a supervisory committee of interested faculty who will set direction, staffing, act as coPIs on grant applications, and provide feedback on suggestions for increased performance from the staff. The RCIC would also coordinate with other like-minded units on campus (the Data Science Initiative, the UCI/SDSC Computation program(?)) that need RCI and support for research and instruction, since requirements for both are growing rapidly. Expanded Description

  • Provide a baseline or birthright level of storage, connectivity, and computing for faculty in all disciplines. If the funding requested is provided, within a year, we can provide >1TB of robust, secure, central storage, 1 Gigabit/ second network connectivity, and 100,000 hours/yr of 64bit compute hours using Open Source Software (OSS) to each faculty member who requests it. These allocations should increase over time and could be augmented to support research projects through grant funding. Expanded Description

  • Establish a widely available Research Desktop Computing Environment (RDCE) to facilitate computational & data science research and teaching. This environment would include access to shared software (both proprietary and OSS), high performance computing resources, visualization tools, assisted access to external UC and national facilities, and appropriate cloud resources. While the RDCE would be more secure than traditional desktop computing, more secure computational and storage environments would be provided for compliance with Data Use Agreements, and other information security frameworks (e.g. HIPAA/FISMA) and Data Sharing policies (e.g. for Genomic Data Sharing). Expanded Description

  • Hire staff to support the RCI and provide much more assistance to researchers to fully leverage the hardware and software . None of the projects under discussion will advance without staff expertise, which is not cheap, but with UCI at the bottom of RCI staff by most measures, this is critical. Career staff would maintain, upgrade, and expand RCI operation, train students, other staff, and faculty in current computational techniques, document processes, assist with grant prep, work with existing staff in other units to provide statistical, analytical, and advanced computing needs, and assist in maintaining compliance with federal requirements for data robustness, backup, retention, re-use, archiving, sharing, and security. Expanded Description