The widespread application and success of computational and data intensive research approaches in every discipline represented on our campuses has resulted in a rapid proliferation of organizations, technologies, and professions affiliated in different ways with the support and advancement of activities related to research computing and data (RCD). While most agree that this growth is helping to advance numerous disciplines, the proliferation of organizations seeking to support, promote, and advance RCD has led to some challenges. Specifically, a lack of understanding and consensus concerning which organizations should be considered a part of RCD support hampers our ability to encourage collaborations among its complementary constituents, leads to unneeded and redundant activities, and makes it difficult to identify strategic priorities and address gaps where specific needs are not being met to advance various disciplinary activities. In this paper we introduce the ecosystem metaphor to help characterize the rapidly changing relationships among the growing set of organizations that in some way support and enable activities related to RCD. The ecosystem concept lends itself well to describing the many entities related to RCD because it emphasizes the larger system over its individual component parts and highlights their interdependence, while explicitly expecting their change over time. Our work to characterize the current RCD ecosystem, while imperfect, will serve as a foundation and framework for the development of a more complete view of the ever-changing RCD ecosystem. A more complete view of the RCD ecosystem will in turn help to advance the broad goals of its members by helping to foster and accelerate new and meaningful collaborations among them.

The Great Plains (GP) CyberTeam is a distributed mentor-mentee workforce development program that works with institutions within the region that have growing Cyberinfrastructure needs. Participants work together to determine the institution’s research computing needs and work through the process from identification to implementation, developing best practices along the way, to enhance campus capabilities that enable research. Here, we discuss the CyberTeam Engagement process from the site identification, the pre-engagement questionnaire, site visit, and future implementation. Then outcomes of and lessons learned from the team’s inaugural engagement at the University of South Dakota are examined.

Prior to the early 2000s, Oklahoma institutions had a very limited history of submitting research Cyberinfrastructure (CI) grant proposals. But over the past decade, this trend has dramatically reversed: since 2003, Oklahoma institutions have submitted 15 research CI proposals, including 8 National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation Proposals, an NSF Experimental Program for the Stimulation of Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) Track-2 proposal with a strong CI focus (jointly with Kansas), an NSF EPSCoR RII Cyber Connectivity (C2) proposal, and five NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure proposals (one in 2013, two in 2014, two in 2015). Of these 15 proposals, 10 have been awarded, 2 have been declined and 3 are pending, a record that far outstrips the state's Fiscal Year 2014 NSF average of 20%. The evolution of Oklahoma's approach, and the growth of the community of CI service providers in the state, are the focus of this paper.

The OneOklahoma Friction Free Network (OFFN) is a dedicated multi-institutional research-only "Science DMZ" network that connects the state's academic Cyberinfrastructure resources -- including all four high performance computing centers -- that is available for use by all Oklahoma academics plus their collaborators. A project of the OneOklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative (OneOCII), OFFN is based on a collaboration of three universities, a nonprofit, and Oklahoma's research, education and government Regional Optical Network. OFFN consists of common configurations of Software Defined Networking infrastructure connected across a new set of optical links, at a minimum of 10 Gbps, and foreshadowing the state's transition to widespread 100 Gbps research connectivity. OneOCII, the parent initiative of OFFN, is a statewide collaboration to offer shared access to resources, both technology and human, to enable the use of advanced computing by research and education statewide. To date, OneOCII has served 52 academic institutions and 48 non-academic organizations.

The Oklahoma Cyberinfrastructure Initiative (OCII) is a mechanism by which institutions in the state can share resources, both physical and human, to enable research and education statewide to utilize advanced computing technologies. OCII provides eight kinds of service: access to cyberinfrastructure; dissemination via an annual conference that has reached over 2500 participants in 11 years; education via a workshop series in person and via videoconferencing; faculty/staff development via summer weeklong workshops; outreach via a supercomputing talk suitable for non-technical audiences; proposal support in the form of both letters of commitment and direct collaboration; technology acquired for institutions or assisting those institutions in acquiring it; workforce development in the form of a mentorship program for Information Technology and Computer Science students statewide. To date, OCII has reached 50 academic and 47 non-academic institutions and organizations.