Edward Lazowska - US grants

This research concerns the performance of parallel systems, and in particular of homogeneous shared-memory multiprocessors. These systems are just now becoming available, show promise of proividing cost- effective high-performance computing for the near-term future, and present a wide range of unsolved problems, many of which apply to other system architectures as well. They will study three specific areas. The first is the influence of software structure on system performance; we will explore the sources of degradation in parallel systems and the relationships among these sources of degradation, providing guidelines for the construction of parallel software that performs well. The second is software control policies for parallel systems; they will develop and evaluate techniques that yield both good program speedup and good system efficiency. The third is performance tools on and for parallel systems; They will build performance debugging tools for parallel programs, and performance modelling tools that address the problems of parallel systems and that exploit parallelism themselves.

The theme of this project at the University of Washington is parallel computing. The award will aid in providing equipment, maintenance and support staff to enhance the existing experimental computer research facility in order to coordinate and stimulate work in the area of parallel computing. The Department has groups with recognized strengths in six distinct areas of computer science: computer architecture, performance analysis, image analysis and graphics, programming environments, computer systems and theory of computation. In each of these groups, significant research will be undertaken that would not be possible without the Infrastructure support. The work will utilize a shared-memory multiprocessor, a networked multiprocessor and a number of workstations to be acquired under the grant as well as other pieces of equipment acquired from both industrial sources and from previous NSF grants. In addition to providing facilities to allow extensions of the previous contributions in each of the areas noted above, it is expected that major steps forward will be made in the overall understanding and effective use of parallel computing.

This project supports a "Workshop on Scientific Computing Performance Analysis" to be held at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO, on August 29-31, 1989. Attendees will come from academia/industry, the national laboratories and the national supercomputer centers. The workshop will concentrate on identifying areas of research opportunity related to performance analysis of high performance computing systems and scientific workload characterization. Research on these and related topics is seen as having significant value in enhancing the efficient use of current, conventional supercomputers and in establishing measures of assessing the potential of newer parallel architectures.

This research concerns the design and implementation of a programming system for building highly parallel applications on networks of multiprocessors. Multiprocessor based shared memory multiprocessors are becoming widely available and promise to provide cost effective high performance computing. Multiprocessor workstations will surely be widely available within the next year: one expects them to be even more cost effective than their mainframe counterparts for many applications, just as current uniprocessor workstations often are more cost effective than uniprocessor mainframes. Simply stated, the goal of this research is to provide a facility for programming a network of multiprocessors as if it were a large, integrated, shared memory computer. This effort requires study of several aspects of operating system structure. First, there is a search for programming primitives that provide the right level of abstraction for expressing parallel algorithms. The important tradeoff, in a system integrating parallelism and distribution, is providing uniformity of access across the network without sacrificing local performance. Second, one must explore alternatives in operating system organization for increasing performance on a single multiprocessor node. The objective here is to provide the lowest overhead mechanisms for parallel execution so that programmers can express and utilize medium grained parallelism. Third, one must develop tools that aid the programmer in assessing the performance of his or her application, and in properly optimizing it for an environment of networked multiprocessors. This project is a natural outgrowth of a program of research in distributed and parallel computing systems in which we have been involved for the past 8 years. This program of research has been supported by NSF under a variety of awards; it also has received significant support from industrial sources, particularly Digital Equipment Corporation, whose Firefly prototype multiprocessor workstations will be our experimental vehicle. (The DECSystems Research Center has supplied Fireflys to Washington, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Toronto, and Cambridge, making these universities uniquely well equipped to conduct experimental research on medium scale multiprocessing.) The results that we have already obtained in our preliminary work on support for parallel computing are in active use by many university sites and by companies such as Sequent, Digital, Microsoft, and Tera.

The fundamental issue addressed in this work is the structuring of operating systems to take advantage of multiprocessors so as to yield the best possible application performance. The division of labor between the kernel and the user level is different on a multiprocessor than on a uniprocessor. On a uniprocessor, the kernel is responsible for address spaces, communication, resource allocation, threads, and thread scheduling. On a shared memory multiprocessor, the kernel iis left in charge of address spaces and resource allocation, but communication, threads, and thread scheduling are implemented at user level through runtime support in each address space. Furthermore, each address space is in direct control over certain key aspects of virtual memory management and file management. It is important to understand that while ``micro-kernel'' designs such as Mach 3.0 take the important step of moving the file system, the virtual memory system, etc., out of the kernel to user-level servers, they leave cross-address space communication, threads, and thread scheduling in the kernel. There are structural differences between these monolithic kernels, micro-kernel designs and the ``nano-kernel'' advocated here. In experimental work over the past several years, the researchers have constructed proof-of-concept prototypes in most of the essential areas that must be addressed: locking protocols, user-level threads, cross-address space communication, the kernel interface, processor allocation policies, and user-level virtual memory management. The objectives in this work are of two kinds, direct and indirect. Direct objectives include: (1) integrating these proof-of-concept prototypes into a single system, convincingly demonstrating the viability of the overall approach; and (2) solving the problems that stand in the way of this integration, some of which are known and some of which can only be discovered by undertaking the task. Indirect objectives include: (a) using the ``core'' of the resulting system to study a number of important policy questions (thread scheduling, processor allocation, virtual memory management) that can only be explored given such an experimental testbed, and (b) using this core as a base for exploring high performance system support for more advanced architectures, specifically large scale machines with distributed memory, distributed/parallel programming using high band-width low-latency networks, and wide-address machines.

This award supports infrastructure for research in high performance parallel/distributed computing. The award supports the purchase of a high performance distributed memory computer. The award also supports a programmer to develop, maintain, and distribute software developed on this computer. The research supported by this infrastructure is of two forms: compute intensive research and systems applications research. The compute intensive research includes computer vision, computer graphics, simulations, 3-D animation, and computational chemistry. The systems applications research includes developing fast operating system kernal service routines, programming models of parallel computation activities, software engineering environments, and fundamental research on parallel algorithms for distributed memory computers.

This high performance connections award provides support for three research
institutions in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area to establish a very
high performance connection to the gigapop at the University of Washington.
The involved institutions are Oregon Graduate Institute, Oregon Health
Sciences University, and Portland State University. Their formation of a
metropolitan area network, initially designed to support their combined
research interests, holds promise for eventual impact of advanced
networking on health and other public services, education, and
community-based access within a metropolitan setting. Initial research to
be supported atop this advanced network link includes the "3-D Visible
Embryonic Heart Project", "The Qasar Project for Predictable, Adaptive
Multimedia Delivery", and "The CORIE Project" (a prototype system for the
Columbia River that deals with meteorological and other related
environmental issues).

This grant will establish a scholarship fund to enable talented, low-income undergraduates to pursue baccalaureate degrees at the University of Washington in the College of Engineering, departments of Computer Science and Mathematics, and the Applied and Computational Mathematical Science (ACMS) program. This scholarship fund will significantly expand the amount of financial assistance available to these students, thereby increasing their retention, as well as their competitiveness for permanent job placement or enrollment in graduate degree programs. Scholarship recipients will be linked with an existing integrated network of successful student support programs where they will receive advising, mentoring, and professional development and leadership training. Another benefit, that cannot be underestimated, is that it will maximize the existing integration between the College of Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, and ACMS, as well as the University of Washington's (UW) student support structure.

This project continues the scholarship fund that will enabled an additional 29 talented, low-income
undergraduates per year to pursue baccalaureate degrees at the University of Washington in the
College of Engineering, departments of Computer Science and Mathematics, and the Applied and Computational Mathematical Science (ACMS) program. This scholarship fund significantly expands the amount of financial assistance available to these students, thereby increasing their retention, as well as their competitiveness for permanent job placement or enrollment in graduate degree programs. Scholarship recipients are linked with an existing integrated network of successful student support programs where they receive advising, mentoring, and professional development and leadership training. Another benefit, that cannot be underestimated, is that it maximizes the existing integration between the College of Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, and ACMS, as well as the University of Washington's (UW) student support structure.

This project involves research and experimentation with cyberinfrastructure components in order to develop and prototype new approaches to information technology for ocean observing systems. The goal is to develop and test ways of managing data from ocean observatories as well as mechanisms for facilitating the operation of ocean observatories. A centerpiece of the work is the initiation of a prototype ocean observatory grid that links submarine facilities off the Pacific coasts of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, the "Laboratory for an Ocean Observatory Knowledge INtegration Grid (LOOKING)," using experimental wireless networks, optical networks, and Grid technology. The LOOKING framework provides middleware to facilitate and enable instrument and infrastructure control, data generation and distributed storage, data assimilation through comparison with ocean simulations, integrative data fusion and analysis, visualization, and spontaneous user collaboration. The effort needed to develop this involves three parts: a physical layer based primarily on network connectivity provided by the OptIPuter and ROADNet projects; research on shore-side software technology based on web-service based implementations of a variety of tools including ocean ontology-based semantic search tools, event-detection in real-time data streams, the integration of OPeNDAP and SRB, and data visualization; and ocean-side research focused on instrument monitoring and control, as well as data-flow management. As part of the proposed work a converged data grid model for the MARS and ROADNet data systems will be developed, data from CODAR sites, ships, cabled observatories and surface buoys will be integrated into the system, and a variety of user services will be implemented. The expectation is that lessons learned from this activity will inform the design of cyberinfrastructure systems for future ocean observatories such as those envisaged within the ORION project. If successful, this project could have a significant impact on the success of the planned ORION ocean observatory project by developing data management and observatory control approaches that can be implemented in ORION and by developing effective user interfaces to a collection of ocean observing systems. Research challenges include developing a software infrastructure suitable for heterogeneous real-time data streams, monitoring and control in non-robust networks, and real-time event detection and characterization. This project involves numerous institutions and combines the efforts of computer science researchers and oceanographers. It leverages, or links to, a number of existing or funded pilot observatory, networking and data system projects including: SCCOOS, MARS, NEPTUNE-Canada, ROADNet, and OptIPuter. New approaches to ocean observing systems involve large arrays of sensors and many mobile, robotic platforms for research and educational activities throughout the ocean basins. Innovative full-ocean-depth observatories in coastal, regional, and global settings can vastly expand human tele-presence within, and the basic understanding of, interlinked processes that modulate climate, create energy and mineral deposits, influence the carbon cycle, drive major hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunami's and violent storms, and support the recently discovered volcanically hosted microbial biosphere-a potential analog for life on other planets.

ABSTRACT

Proposal: CNS 0454394
PI: Kaplan, David L.
CoPIs: Gaetano Borriello, Christopher J. Diorio, Edward D. Lazowska
Institution: University of Washington
Title: CRI: RFID Ecosystem
Program: NSF 04-588 CISE Computing Research Infrastructure


This project will explore applications for RFID tags in homes and workplaces rather than previously studied applications for product supply-chains. Applications relevant to the workplace and home will be explored that will integrate RFID capabilities with other ubiquitous computing technologies. Systems issues to be explored include: innovative RFID tags with additional sensing, middleware and operating-system support for sensing/actuation events, database organization based on distributed data on servers and tags, mining of sensing/actuation events to infer users activities, and ubiquitous computing applications for the workplace. These technologies have deep privacy, legal, social, and policy implications. The project will incorporate researchers in both technology and social aspects of technology. Broader impacts of this project include potential applications, and use in education and design projects at the University of Washington.

The 2006 University of Washington Seattle Innovation Symposium is the second in a series that was launched to build and maintain a vibrant network of researchers focused on advancing the body of knowledge on sustainable innovation and to create materials, such as case students, educational TV programs and published papers to share research with both the academic and business communities. The Symposium builds on the earlier initiative by continuing to engage previous participants and expanding to new researchers. The meeting employs a proven methodology, moving from small teamwork to larger teams and finally, into a plenary discussion. The expanded network of participants will consider original written and video-based case studies of innovation at a number of levels of complexity. Newly developed video case studies will consider not only individual expert innovators but also innovative teams in manufacturing and complex project enterprise innovation at the level of new aircraft. The results will engage young researchers and provide a variety of platforms to make results accessible.

This project, developing virtual PlanetLab(an emulation Planet Lab), targets verifying whether an experiment attains the same performance and failure behavior as when run directly on the PlanetLab/ GENI system. The work involves network emulation, building a toolkit to ease the development and programming on PlanetLab, investigating control, and managing plane services. At present, only with extreme effort on the part of the researcher is this verification theoretically possible with Emulab. In fifteen years the Internet has gone from an obscure research network known to the academic community to a critical piece of national infrastructure; but, because its architecture is unable to quickly adapt to meet emerging challenges, it is becoming the victim of its own success. Vulnerabilities are being increasingly exploited limiting assimilation of new technologies and support of new applications. To foster the development of a new generation of distributed systems and network protocols, researchers around the world have created a testbed called PlanetLab, enabling research into truly planetary scale services where each researcher may utilize a virtualized slice across a widely distributed set of nodes. PlanetLab currently spans three hundred separate locations worldwide hosting over four hundred active research projects. Consequently, to support network and distributed systems research, NSF CISE has recently proposed constructing GENI (Global Environment for Network Investigations). This work aims to

-Dramatically improve the cost-effectiveness of planetary scale testbeds such as PlanetLab and GENI and
-Reduce the startup time for new PlanetLab/GENI researchers to develop and deploy an experiment.

A transactional service manager that can adapt/survive the myriad types of node failures encountered in practice, simple job and pipe control, and distributed debugger are expected to facilitate the use of PlanetLab. The software toolkit enables research in

-Robust content distribution, Real time multimedia delivery, Security, Routing,
-Network embedded storage and file sharing, Distributed information management,
-Internet Measurement, Distributed resource allocation, and Network layer modifications.

The 2007 UW Seattle Innovation Symposium is the third in a series launched in
2005. The series seeks (1) to build and maintain a network of researchers who advance the body of knowledge on ?sustainable innovation,? and (2) to create artifacts such as case studies, published papers, and Educational TV programs to share research on sustainable innovation as widely as possible with other researchers, company innovators, and, through Public Television, the general public. The UW Seattle Innovation Symposium continues to build a critical
mass of leading researchers (academics, artists, PhD students studying innovation, and company
innovators/entrepreneurs) to: (1) share intellectual assets and experiences that identify the innovations and innovation practices with potential to create new products and services, and (2) explore organizational structures and practices that will quickly create effective levels of ?sustainable innovation? in economics. The ongoing symposium series will create a multi-disciplined network of academic and company innovators that can continue to work collaboratively on the myriad individual research projects required to extend our knowledge base on innovation, and shorten the time that it takes for innovations in particular companies to make their positive impact on the economy at large. SIS07 will also begin to move its attention outward from individual businesses to larger, global concerns. Situations like global warming and the coming end of extraction industries will require, not just ingenious stop-gaps
but complete reconceivings of fundamental aspects of society. The multidisciplinary meeting engages senior researchers, corporate leaders and students to produce new insights.

There is a significant and growing concern that current and future computing professionals, as they enter the workforce upon graduation, are under-prepared for careers in the development and maintenance of software applications that support web-scale data intensive computing. Large scale cluster computing is a response to the increasing demands for high availability, fault tolerant, decentralized, and very large data retrieval needs in our country. Given the engineering and other constraints involved, optimal utilization of such resources will always be a concern for computing graduates, and thus for the colleges and universities that prepare them. This field requires expertise in a cross-section of engineering and computing disciplines.

This 2.5 day workshop in large-scale cluster computing provides material and curricular support for undergraduate teaching institutions. This initial workshop, to be conducted July 16-18, 2008, will invite professors in computer science and software engineering to a workshop at the University of Washington, where such a course has previously been conducted successfully. The goal is to encourage other institutions to adopt some or all of the curricular materials and initiatives into their courses, thus preparing a greater number of computing graduates for careers in web-scale data intensive computing.

The explicit goal of this workshop is to reach a large and diverse of group of computing professors, and in turn their students, to increase the likelihood that university graduates are able to step into their careers in such fields as grid and cloud computing and be able to contribute as quickly and effectively as possible now and throughout their careers. We expect this workshop to inform future similar events to further increase the impacts.

The TransLight/Pacific Wave (TL/PW) project builds on close and effective collaborations built over the last decade among the University of Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and the Corporation for Educational Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) to create and operate a unified distributed exchange service for Research and Education (R&E) networking in the Asia-Pacific hemisphere. TL/PW will present a unified connectivity face toward the West for all US R&E networks including Internet2, National Lambda Rail and Federal agency networks, enabling general and specific peerings with more than 15 international R&E links, including those funded by other NSF IRNC projects, serving scores of countries. Distributed peering services at network Layers 1, 2 and 3 will allow the project to seamlessly support domain-specific projects while remaining committed to equitable shared global R&E network services. TL/PW will work with Internet2, National Lambda Rail, the other IRNC awardees and international networks to provide seamless evolutionary production networking services to the international research community. The value of TL/PW to the nation and the world is demonstrated by the fact that TL/PW is not proposing to buy new international links. Rather, TL/PW funding will be used to provide domestic backhaul, hosting, support and facilitation for those engaged in R&E networking in the region.

TL/PW will provide domestic support for AARNet's SX-TransPORT project, which provides two 10Gbps circuits from Australia to Hawaii to the West Coast of the U.S. on the Southern Cross Cable Network submarine fiber system. This project not only connects Australia's R&E networking community but also provides connectivity for the world's premiere setting for astronomical observatories, the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The Mauna Kea observatories comprise over $1 billion of international investment by 13 countries in some of the most important cyberinfrastructure resources in the world. TL/PW will also continue to advance and support research network connections in the Australasia and Pacific regions.

The Intellectual Merit of TL/PW derives from its championing of end-to-end connectivity and network advancement that stimulates innovation among leading domain scientists and cyberinfrastructure engineers. TL/PW has innovated to create the world's model distributed exchange serving the global R&E networking community, and will continue to advance reliable and cost-effective global cyberinfrastructure to meet broader research and education needs. TL/PW will focus on emerging network-enabled sustainable services, like cloud computing, and will take on a special leadership role to support major international scientific cyberinfrastructure in areas unique to its service area: astronomy and ocean observatories. TL/PW will enable the advancement of scientific discovery, and in so doing, advance the state of cyberinfrastructure-empowered research and education.

The Broader Impact of TL/PW will result from its sweeping enablement of US researchers to easily collaborate with their colleagues in many of the fastest-developing parts of the world. TL/PW is superbly positioned to support global access to large-scale international sensor networks like the NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative and the substantial international investment in telescopes that comprise the Mauna Kea Observatories. Working with major commercial players, including Amazon and Microsoft, TL/PW will actively advance the state of cloud computing services that investigators will increasingly apply in their research as a greener and more cost-effective approach to cyberinfrastructure deployment. TL/PW also plans to leverage its unique positioning to extend R&E networking into the Pacific Islands, which are central to understanding the global phenomena of climate change, sea-level rise and ocean acidification.

Through the S-STEM project "Engineering the Husky Promise," the University of Washington (UW) establishes a scholarship program for talented low-income undergraduates in UW's College of Engineering, thereby supporting the "Husky Promise" - a guarantee for full tuition and fee scholarships for Pell Grant-eligible Washington State residents. In the S-STEM program, each student is awarded a scholarship for up to $9000 per year for up to two years, depending on financial need. The program supports at least 15 students per year, and more, if not all students have this much unmet need. The significant financial support offered by S-STEM scholarships provides financially disadvantaged students additional time to focus on their studies, because they can work fewer hours at part-time jobs. Beyond the scholarships, College of Engineering professors serve as mentors to S-STEM Scholars, especially through undergraduate research, and the scholars are offered an opportunity to develop a professional portfolio. The College also reserves slots for scholarship recipients in its Engineering Community, an exciting experiential learning opportunity for engineering and pre-engineering students. Four Resident Advisers, mostly engineering students, connect Community members with resources and programs and act as peer mentors. On-site academic support, such as drop-in advising sessions, registration assistance, departmental and corporate information sessions, and tutoring sessions, is provided by the College of Engineering. Social and informational events are planned by both the Advisors and the College.

Specific objectives for "Engineering the Husky Promise" are that:
- minority students underrepresented in engineering, including those from local programs (Washington State GEAR-UP, MESA, and Rainier Scholars), receive at least 20% of the S-STEM scholarships;
- women receive at least 35% of the S-STEM scholarships;
- transfer students, of which half will be from UW MESA partner Community Colleges, receive at least 25% of the S-STEM scholarships,
- 81% of the S-STEM freshmen be admitted to a UW College of Engineering Department by the end of the sophomore year;
- 95% of S-STEM transfer students from community colleges graduate from a College of Engineering Department within three years; and
- at least 60% of S-STEM recipients participate in undergraduate research with College of Engineering faculty.

In order to serve students in the future and build on the basis of the S-STEM program, the College of Engineering is raising a sustainable endowment for additional scholarships.

The University of Washington is home to leading research programs conducted by internationally recognized faculty from diverse domains including oceanography, astronomy, physics, genomics, computer science, bioengineering, and climate modeling, among others. These efforts depend on high throughput data transfers between UW and remote sites, as well as between UW laboratory systems and centrally managed scalable research compute and storage systems residing in our campus network Science DMZ.

This project enhances the connectivity options of the University of Washington campus network facility dedicated exclusively to research, using a hybrid Layer-2/Layer-3 (L2/L3) approach. These enhancements replace previous ad hoc approaches to meeting the requirements of leading researchers with sustainable and scalable approaches. The enhancements are catalyzing advances in a broad range of high-impact science projects by enabling the emerging world of data-driven discovery. The UW eScience Institute provides the "intellectual infrastructure" for data-driven discovery. The enhancements generated from this project provide a critical component of the "physical infrastructure". The two together are essential for UW to remain at the leading edge as the nature of discovery evolves.

This effort directly and immediately provides a dramatic enhancement to the capabilities of a broad range of science programs involving faculty, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists, and undergraduate and graduate students. It also dramatically increases the accessibility of key UW facilities and data to scientists regionally, nationally, and internationally, and the accessibility of remote facilities and data to UW scientists.

The Big Data Innovation Hub for the Western United States will join stakeholders from academia, industry, non-profit institutions and the community who share common challenges and innovative approaches related to the acquisition, storage, analysis and integration of large or "messy" data, commonly referred to as Big Data. The West's Innovation Hub (Hub) will serve 13 states with Montana, Colorado and New Mexico marking the eastern boundary. This project will develop the organizational and governance structures for the Hub, and initiate efforts toward defining spoke activities for subsequent phases of the data innovation hubs program.

The initial themes include Big Data technology, data-enabled scientific discovery and learning, managing natural resources and hazards, metro data science, and precision medicine. Partnerships fostered through the Hub will enable the use of Big Data to assess risks related to regional and long-term decisions. The Hub's structure will enable impact in later phases of the Hubs program that may include data-driven models for managing natural resources to tools for integrating self-collected patient data for more precise care options. Through coordination activities that inspire the action of its members, the Hub has the potential to facilitate the improved flow of commercial technologies in ways that maximize competitiveness for member organizations, such as universities, and vice versa: the Hub has the potential to expand the impact of its members' technologies through greater adoption or via start-ups. The Hub will be impactful by facilitating cross-discipline approaches to Big Data innovation and problem solving, influencing the next generation of thought leaders and data scientists. The partnerships enabled by the Hub will lead to professional certificate programs and student internships, creating a pipeline of graduates from partner institutions to impact corporations, public and governmental agencies, national labs, resource-planning agencies, and regulatory commissions.

Project URL: BDHub.SDSC.edu

The BD Hubs foster regional networks of stakeholders and cooperate nationally on US priorities of importance to a region and to the nation. The activities of the BD Hubs contribute to a vibrant national data innovation ecosystem. The West Big Data Innovation Hub builds and strengthens strategic partnerships -- harnessing the data revolution to address scientific and societal challenges. Whether working towards the future of data-informed healthcare or tackling projects in disaster recovery, the Hub envisions a diverse community empowered to contribute to areas of national priority. The Hubs focus on data science activities and initiatives that inspire cross-sector collaboration and exemplify the need for multi-disciplinary approaches.

With this award, the West Big Data Innovation Hub will: (1) Develop and enable translational data science (TDS) pilot projects in our thematic areas to highlight the value of cross-sector collaboration, enhance fluency with real-world use cases, and emphasize a pragmatic and holistic view of the data and analytics lifecycles. We envision our signature TDS initiatives for 2019-2023 to include: Fire and Water: Data Collaborative for the Future of Natural Resource Management; Stress-Testing Access for Road Video; and Housing Instability: Trusted Data Collaborative for Responsible Data Management. (2) Facilitate team formation across different stakeholder groups through our activities, capturing inspirational stories and encouraging teams to reflect and share their insights about cross-sector collaboration. (3) Raise awareness of regional opportunities and inspire work in priority areas including Natural Resources & Hazards, Metro Data Science, Health & Medicine, Data-Enabled Discovery & Learning, Data Sharing, Cloud Computing, and Responsible Data Science. (4) Support data science education and workforce development. Recognizing that a diverse, multi-faceted workforce is key to addressing current scientific and societal challenges, we will continue to expand our portfolio of education and workforce development efforts, including a focus on Train-the-Trainer sessions, Pedagogy and Practice, Data Science for Social Good and the Data Science Corps, Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data, and institutional change -- providing a platform for broadening participation in data science. Core to our progress in Programmatic Activities, Socio-Technical Shared Resources and Services, and Education and Workforce Development Activities will be a coordinated evaluation, opportunities for scaling regional successes to the national network of Big Data Hubs, and strategic efforts for Hub sustainability including the development of external funding streams. These efforts will be designed to enable community input and to strengthen channels for ongoing dialogue.

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.

The University of California, San Diego's San Diego Supercomputer Center and Information Technology Services Division, the University of Washington's eScience Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley's Division of Data Science will develop and operate CloudBank, a cloud access entity that will help the computer science community access and use public clouds for research and education by delivering a set of managed services designed to simplify access to public clouds. Driven by the profound potential of the public cloud and the associated complexity in using it, CloudBank will serve as an integrated service provider to the research community through a comprehensive set of user-facing and business operations functions. These services will span the spectrum from novice to advanced cloud users, including front line user support, cloud solution consulting, training, and assistance in preparing proposals that include cloud resources. CloudBank will provide innovative financial engineering options that will give researchers more flexible cloud terms tailored for their needs and contribute to the sustainability of CloudBank operations. CloudBank will help NSF by bundling multiple small requests that come directly to NSF into a bulk request to cloud providers, dis-incentivizing more costly direct connections. Through this aggregation and innovative financial contract types, CloudBank will pass along savings to researchers that would otherwise be unavailable to them.

CloudBank will provide on-ramp support that reduces researcher cloud adoption pain points such as: managing cost, translating and upgrading research computing environments to an appropriate cloud platform, and learning cloud-based technologies that accelerate and expand research. It will be complemented by a cloud usage monitoring system that gives NSF-funded researchers the ability to easily grant permissions to research group members and students, set spending limits, and recover unused cloud credits. These systems will support multiple cloud vendors, and be accessed via intuitive, easy-to-use user portal that gives users a single point of entry to these functions.

The CloudBank project and associated portal software, outreach and training materials, and experience in negotiating and delivering public cloud services will significantly advance the state of the practice and understanding of how to use these resources in computer science research and education. The close collaboration between the CloudBank project, cloud providers, researchers, and students will simultaneously enable new research while providing a unique opportunity to develop and study the operational, technological and business dimensions of fundamentally new model of public/private partnership in the service of the research enterprise.

It is a primary objective of CloudBank to broaden the access and impact of cloud computing across the many fields of computer science research and education. The project will reach hundreds of researchers and students through allocated research projects and classes. A far larger group of stakeholders will benefit by CloudBank outreach efforts, such as workshops, publications, the CloudBank Center of Excellence on Cloud-Enabled Research and Education, and the CloudBank Advisory Board. CloudBank offers a long-term vision for service and sustainability that will broaden the impact of public cloud computing across all sciences and help ensure that students entering the workforce and research enterprise will be able to contribute and compete in the global economy.

This project is accessible at http://tiny.cc/cloudbank

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.