XSEDE12

Software: What Is Campus Bridging and What is XSEDE Doing About It?

Abstract: The term “campus bridging” was first used in the creation of an NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure task force. That task force eventually arrived at the following description of campus bridging: 

“Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist’s campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the ‘virtual’ aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO.” 

That definition and the task force report detail many things that could conceivably be done under the rubric of campus bridging. 

But unlike other topics such as software or data, there is little ability to point to something and say, “Aha, there is a campus bridge.” Campus bridging is more a viewpoint and a set of usability, software, and information concerns that should inform everything done within XSEDE and the more general NSF strategy Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Innovation. 

In this paper we outline several specific use cases of campus bridging technologies that have been identified as priorities for XSEDE in the next four years, ranging from documentation to software used entirely outside of XSEDE to software that helps bridge from individual researcher to campus to XSEDE cyberinfrastructure.