A Report from the U.S. National Science Foundation Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure

This talk will review the mission, activities, and recommendations of the “Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure” recently appointed by the leadership on the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF invests in “people, ideas, and tools” and in particular is a major investor in basic research to produce communication and information technology (ICT) as well as its use in supporting basic research and education in most all areas of science and engineering. The NSF through its Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) has provided substantial funding for high-end computing resources, initially by awards to five supercomputer centers and later through $70 M per year investments in two partnership alliances for advanced computation infrastructures centered at the University of Illinois and the University of California, San Diego. It has also invested in an array of complementary R&D initiatives in networking, middleware, digital libraries, collaboratories, computational and visualization science, and distributed terascale grid environments.