SDSC Takes Leading Role in NSF Event Focused on CSSI Project Goals, Collaboration

Published December 6, 2023

SDSC Director of Research Data Services Christine Kirkpatrick and SDSC Senior Project Manager for DeCODER and CSSI PI meeting Lynne Schreiber at the recent CSSI meeting in Houston.  Credit: C. Kirkpatrick

By Kimberly Mann Bruch, SDSC Communications

Several members of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) community at UC San Diego participated in the recent 2023 Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) meeting in Houston, Texas, where more than 225 principal investigators funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) met to discuss collaboration opportunities between their projects. NSF representatives were also there to gather feedback from participants about the agency’s goals and objectives for CSSI projects.

“NSF’s CSSI portfolio includes projects from every domain-focused directorate. Gathering together allowed each team to showcase their work so that synergistic opportunities were easily identified,” said SDSC Director of Research Data Services Christine Kirkpatrick, who chaired the CSSI meeting organization committee. “The emphasis of the meeting was on creating time for interactions through break-out topics suggested and selected by the community as well as three poster sessions.”

The meeting included more than 175 posters, with several SDSC researchers featured: Andreas Goetz, AMBER project; Amit Chourasia, Quakeworx; SGX3, led by Michael Zentner and ENZO-e, led by former SDSC Director Mike Norman.

Additional projects covered topics from quantum free energy methods to seismic simulators, to a Center of Excellence for creating science gateways, to cosmology and astrophysics. Also presented, was Kirkpatrick’s own CSSI, DeCODER, led by Kenton McHenry at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). DeCODER extends a framework begun under the EarthCube Coordination Office, led by Kirkpatrick, that provides a way to search across disparate geoscience data sources while presenting tools and notebooks relevant to inquiry.

Kirkpatrick said that the CSSI meeting was co-located with a CyberTraining Principal Investigator meeting, which was led by University of Virginia Computer Science Professor Geoffrey Fox, who also helped to orchestrate the CSSI meeting. The goal of co-locating the CSSI meeting with the CyberTraining meeting was to increase collaborations, including projects affiliated with the NSF’s Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (CDS&E) and OAC Core Research (OAC Core) programs.

Featured at the CyberTraining Meeting was SDSC’s Mary Thomas and Bob Sinkovitz, who presented a talk and a poster about the recently NSF-funded project called COMPrehensive Learning for end-users to Effectively utilize Cyberinfrastructure, or COMPLECS. They shared an array of training opportunities with meeting attendees regarding Spring 2024 workshops and webinars related to utilizing high-performance computing NSF resources.

“We were really pleased with the outcome of the co-located meetings. The CSSI and CyberTraining communities represent two of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure’s priority areas – software and data infrastructure and learning and workforce development,” said NSF CSSI Program Director Varun Chandola. “The co-located event allowed researchers to explore new possibilities for their own research and to pursue new collaborations across the two programs.”

The CSSI meeting was funded by the NSF (award no. 2332200).