Grid Computing: The Next Decade -- Report and Summary

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of global scientific cyberinfrastructure over the past decade, highlighting fragmentation issues, funding challenges, and proposing a coordinated approach to enhance interoperability and collaboration in scientific computing.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive analysis of CI fragmentation, discusses funding model shortcomings, and proposes a blueprint process for a more coherent global cyberinfrastructure strategy.

Findings

Fragmentation hampers interoperation and collaboration.

Current funding models mix research and engineering, hindering transition to production.

A draft mission statement and blueprint process are proposed.

Abstract

The evolution of the global scientific cyberinfrastructure (CI) has, over the last 10+ years, led to a large diversity of CI instances. While specialized, competing and alternative CI building blocks are inherent to a healthy ecosystem, it also becomes apparent that the increasing degree of fragmentation is hindering interoperation, and thus limiting collaboration, which is essential for modern science communities often spanning international groups and multiple disciplines (but even 'small sciences', with smaller and localized communities, are often embedded into the larger scientific ecosystem, and are increasingly dependent on the availability of CI.) There are different reasons why fragmentation occurs, on technical and social level. But also, it is apparent that the current funding model for creating CI components largely fails to aid the transition from research to production, by mixing CS research and IT engineering challenges into the same funding strategies. The 10th anniversary of the EU funded project 'Grid Lab' (which was an early and ambitious attempt on providing a consolidated and science oriented cyberinfrastructure software stack to a specific science community) was taken as an opportunity to invite international leaders and early stage researchers in grid computing and e-Science from Europe, America and Asia, and, together with representatives of the EU and US funding agencies, to discuss the fundamental aspects of CI evolution, and to contemplate the options for a more coherent, more coordinated approach to the global evolution of CI. This open document represents the results of that workshop - including a draft of a mission statement and a proposal for a blueprint process - to inform the wider community as well as to encourage external experts to provide their feedback and comments.