Abstract
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2015 awarded funding for a first-of-a-kind distributed cyberinfrastructure (DCI) system called Jetstream. Jetstream will be the NSF's first production cloud for general-purpose science and engineering research and education. Jetstream, scheduled for production in January 2016, will be based on the OpenStack cloud environment software with a menu-driven interface to make it easy for users to select a pre-composed Virtual Machine (VM) to perform a particular discipline-specific analysis. Jetstream will use the Atmosphere user interface developed as part of iPlant, providing a low barrier to use by practicing scientists, engineers, educators, and students, and Globus services from the University of Chicago for seamless integration into the national cyberinfrastructure fabric. The team implementing Jetstream has as their primary mission extending the reach of the NSF's eXtreme Digital (XD) program to researchers, educators, and research students who have not previously used NSF XD program resources, including those in communities and at institutions that traditionally lack significant cyberinfrastructure resources. We will, for example, use virtual Linux Desktops to deliver DCI capabilities supporting research and research education at small colleges and universities, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), Tribal colleges, and higher education institutions in states designated by the NSF as eligible for funding via the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). Jetstream will be a novel distributed cyberinfrastructure, with production components in Indiana and Texas. In particular, Jetstream will deliver virtual Linux desktops to tablet devices and PDAs with reasonable responsiveness running over cellular networks. This paper will discuss design and application plans for Jetstream as a novel Distributed CyberInfrastructure system for research education.
Highlights
US science and engineering has many important needs for a variety of forms of distributed cyberinfrastructure
Jetstream is a new cloud system currently under construction, funded primarily through a grant award from the National Science Foundation [1, 2] to a partnership led by the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute (IUPTI) of Indiana University (NSF Award #ACI-1445604)
In the remainder of this paper, we explain how Jetstream will fulfill this goal by complementing existing NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure and in particular address the implementation of Jetstream in ways that will lead to adoption by researchers and research students at under-resourced postsecondary educational institutions throughout the US
Summary
US science and engineering has many important needs for a variety of forms of distributed cyberinfrastructure. The NSF solicitation for the grant program that provided funds for Jetstream [1] expresses the NSF’s view that needs of the US open science and research community have evolved more quickly than the diversity of resources available via the XD program and supported by XSEDE: The current solicitation is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure by exploring new and creative approaches to delivering computational resources to the scientific community. In the remainder of this paper, we explain how Jetstream will fulfill this goal by complementing existing NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure and in particular address the implementation of Jetstream in ways that will lead to adoption by researchers and research students at under-resourced postsecondary educational institutions throughout the US.
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