The Need for Flexible Community Research Infrastructure

Many areas of computing research have strong empirical components, and thus require testbeds, test networks, compute facilities, clouds, and other infrastructure for running experiments. The most successful facilities of these types are those built by the communities that need them: domain experts are in the best position to ensure that infrastructure they design meet the needs of their communities. The observation that we make in this chapter is that the hardware, and in many cases, software, infrastructure needs that underlie many of these facilities are remarkably similar. This points out the opportunity to build infrastructure that supports a wide range of computing research domains in an easy to use, cost effective, and low-risk manner. This chapter describes our vision for the future of computing research infrastructure.