Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability Workshop

Workshop report preprint now available.

Indiana University is hosting an NSF-sponsored workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability on March 26 & 27th 2009. We are inviting the submission of position papers from the software and scientific community, to be used as input to the workshop and as a way of identifying additional diverse participants.

The position paper process is intended to solicit input from the larger community and to serve as an opportunity for individuals to indicate a desire to participate in the workshop. Attendees will be invited on the basis of position papers submitted. Individuals submitting papers by 20 February may indicate that they would like to be considered for inclusion in the workshop.

The workshop will be held at the University Place Conference Center on the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis campus in Indianapolis, Indiana on March 26th & 27th, 2009. For more information about the workshop location see - http://www.universityplace.iupui.edu/index.html and http://www.iupui.edu/.

If you would like to add a position paper, comment on papers, or apply for a stipend you must first login or create a new account.

General Session Webcast

Talks presented during the general sessions will be webcast from the workshop web pages.  You may submit questions to the speakers by emailing researchtechnologies@iu.edu.  Click here to view the General Session Webcast:  http://cisoftwaresustainability.iu-pti.org/nsfworkshop/nsfCalendar/nsfCalendar.html.

Download the General Session Agenda

Project Summary

The National Science Foundation’s strategy for 21st century innovation depends on rapid creation ofsoftware to enable scientific discovery. The NSF workshop report “Planning for CyberinfrastructureSupport” stated, “CI [Cyberinfrastructure] changes the rules and foundations of the research endeavor across much of NSF. CI software is a new class of artifact that should be the target of explicit design, construction, study, and evolution.” Indiana University proposes a workshop to pursue this type of study. Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability will examine the question “given millions of dollars invested in initiating software development, how is software that will be important to the US research and engineering communities identified, maintained, and supported over years to decades?”

Some software critical for various areas of cyber-enabled research exists in ways that seem sustainable almost indefinitely. The Linux operating system is maintained and sustained through open source community effort and sales of support from companies such as RedHat and Novell, Inc. Community source software such as Sakai exists through a complex but successful combination of pooled effort, membership dues, and a community source license. Much other critical software supports much smaller communities, however, and exists in a variety of less reliably sustainable states.

The goals of the Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability workshop are as follows:

• Examine software evaluation and adoption models by individual research labs and virtual organizations
• Examine models for long-term software sustainability – the ability to obtain the software one wants with assurance, obtain the information required to use the software, obtain the software and hardware environments required to run the software, and use the software.
• Discuss mechanisms for supporting sustainability, including direct government support, university-funded consortia, open source (with or without commercial support), community source, and commercialization

We plan to solicit white papers on software sustainability and reusability in advance. Afterward, we will document the workshop results to provide insights into creating sustainable scientific cyberinfrastructure software support models. We may also make recommendations to the NSF for future funding programs.

Questions? Email researchtechnologies@iu.edu.