Opportunities for Distributed Science:

A DOE National Collaboratories Program Workshop

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

Boulder, Colorado

December 1-3, 2004

Meeting Host: Don Middleton, NCAR Meeting Organizers: Larry Rahn, SNL and Deb Agarwal, LBNL

 

WORKSHOP GOALS

• Gather future DOE science requirements for collaboration and distributed science capabilities
• Involve scientists from disciplines not previously involved in the DOE National Collaboratories program
• Educate DOE scientists about what is possible
• Develop science use cases that will drive the next generation DOE National Collaboratories program
• Target building a program that would start in 2007 and extend for ~5 years

OVERVIEW

Scientific research is increasingly a global endeavor, research teams are geographically distributed and the data, instruments, and computational resources used by researchers are often located throughout the world as well. These teams need new tools and an advanced infrastructure to facilitate progress on increasingly complex problems, management of large amounts of information, and to enable new collaborative research paradigms. The DOE National Collaboratories (NC) Program provides tools that enable scientists to discover, coordinate, and safely use the resources on the network. Projects associated with the program have been developing new software technologies and techniques for distributed science and demonstrating them in pilot projects that span the DOE Office of Science.

This workshop will bring together visionary discipline scientists and computer scientists to define the current and future challenges faced by DOE scientists. A major goal is to understand and document the requirements of the major distributed science programs so we can define a vision forward for the National Collaboratories Program based on these requirements. This workshop is the second in a series of three workshops. The first workshop gathered together computer scientists and the existing collaboratories projects to look at what is possible in a next generation DOE collaboratories program. This second workshop is focused on gathering application requirements, particularly applications that have not traditionally participated in the program. The third workshop will concentrate on developing a vision forward for the DOE National Collaboratories program based on the outcomes of the first and second workshops. The draft report from the first workshop in this series is available under the agenda button on this web site. We have also made available the reports from other recent DOE application requirements gathering exercises such as the networking roadmap and the data management workshops.

The first two days of this workshop will be organized into keynote speakers, panels, and breakout sessions. The keynote speakers will provide individual science discipline perspectives and cross-discipline and cross-agency views of the future needs and capabilities to help set the stage for the discussions. Panel sessions will address the successes of the current collaboratory program; next generation and currently available capabilities available to support distributed science; and current issues and roadblocks to success. The breakouts will concentrate on further identifying and developing the requirements across the represented science domains. The goal of the third day (which is a half day) is to summarize the requirements gathered during the meeting and plan the outline of the requirements report. We will also discuss and plan the third workshop.

See who is attending

This workshop is sponsored by DOE MICS.

For further information regarding this meeting, please contact Deb Agarwal.