Internet2 is a not-for-profit United States computer networking consortium led by members from the research and education communities, industry, and government. The Internet2 consortium administrative headquarters are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices in Washington, D.C. and Emeryville, California.As of November 2013, Internet2 has over 500 members including 251 institutions of higher education, 9 partners and 76 members from industry, over 100 research and education networks or connector organizations, and 67 affiliate members.Internet2 operates the Internet2 Network, an Internet Protocol network using optical fiber that delivers network services for research and education, and provides a secure network testing and research environment. In late 2007, Internet2 began operating its newest dynamic circuit network, the Internet2 DCN, an advanced technology that allows user-based allocation of data circuits over the fiber-optic network.The Internet2 Network, through its regional network and connector members, connects over 60,000 U.S. educational, research, government and "community anchor" institutions, from primary and secondary schools to community colleges and universities, public libraries and museums to health care organizations.The Internet2 community develops and deploys network technologies for the future of the Internet. These technologies include large-scale network performance measurement and management tools, secure identity and access management tools and capabilities such as scheduling high-bandwidth, high-performance circuits.Internet2 members serve on several advisory councils, collaborate in a variety of working groups and special interest groups, gather at spring and fall member meetings, and are encouraged to participate in the strategic planning process.S.S.
The Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program was launched by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2022 as the latest evolution of the NSF's 40-year-old support for a national-scale cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. The transition to ACCESS included a significant transformation in the policies and processes for obtaining resource allocations. While the largest allocations of resource time still require substantial proposal effort and close review, the vast majority of researchers are able to access resources quickly and with significantly less proposal effort and proportionally less effort for ACCESS allocations staff and volunteer reviewers. Due in large part to these changes, the first three years of ACCESS have realized a twofold increase in the number of projects and principal investigators along with a threefold increase in the number of jobs run. The end result has been to substantially broaden use as well as minimize the "time to science" for researchers. Overall, the policy changes, combined with increased resource capacity available from ACCESS-allocated resources, supported a transition from allocations as "gatekeeper" mode to a more welcoming "gateway" approach and have dramatically changed the impact of the ACCESS ecosystem on the research and education community.
The High-Energy Physics (HEP) and Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) communities have faced significant challenges in understanding their global network flows across the world’s research and education (R&E) networks. This article describes an update on the status of the work carried out to tackle this challenge by the Scientific Network Tags (Scitags) initiative, including the evolving framework and tools, as well as our plans to improve network visibility before the next WLCG Network Data Challenge in 2026. The Scitags initiative is a long-term effort to improve the visibility and management of network traffic for data-intensive sciences. It has created a set of tools, standards, and proof-of-concept demonstrators that show the feasibility of identifying the owner (community) and purpose (activity) of network traffic anywhere in the network.
There is considerable debate around modes of professionalization for the research computing and data (RCD) community. In 2018, credentialing was recommended around three roles (systems facing, software facing, and researcher facing). Reviewing the experience in the profession since 2018 and with new survey data collected in 2022, we provide an expanded set of findings and recommendations addressing career paths, inclusion, professional networks, burnout, community building, and other challenges facing research computing and data professionals. Although there is support for this broader view of professionalization via a professional society, there is also variation in views across the many types of RCD professionals with regard to the desired function of such a society.
Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Facilitation amplifies the productivity of researchers engaged in computing-intensive and data-intensive investigations. CI Facilitators help researchers to adapt their workflows to CI resources, and teaches these researchers how to use these systems, bridging between researchers and technology experts. The importance of CI Facilitators is well understood, and there is broad consensus about their need for ongoing training, especially because of not only their highly diverse career backgrounds and domains of expertise, but also the rapid advancement of CI technologies. The Virtual Residency Program (VRP) has been addressing this training gap since 2015, offering summer workshops that teach key CI Facilitation skills. These workshops are community driven and community developed. The 2020 VRP workshop, for the first time, featured an external evaluation of the efficacy and value of the workshop. This paper examines the results of that evaluation, to determine the value of the VRP to the CI Facilitator community, and thus to the many researchers these CI Facilitators serve. Since 2015, all VRP activities collectively ave had a total of 953 participants, from 381 institutions in every US state and 3 US territories plus 12 other countries on 5 continents.
