Cyberenvironment Project Management:
September 5, 2006
B. F. Spencer, Jr.1
Randal Butler 2
Doru Marcusiu 2
舒琪早期电影Thomas Finholt 3
Ian Foster 4
Carl Kesselman 5
1
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 2 National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 3 School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 4 Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 5 Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Marina Del Way, CA
The work described in this report was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant number CMS-0117853. Any opinions, findings, or conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Acknowledgments
This work received support from the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number CMS-0117853; from the National Science Foundation Middleware Initiative; and from the National Science Foundation's NCSA CORE award.
Many former NEESgrid collaborators and current colleagues provided input and feedback crucial to the writing of this document. We could not have proceeded without their assistance and support.叶炫清 从前慢
This document could not have been conceived at all, had it not been for the years of close collaboration of the NEES System Integrator Team that went into making the NEESgrid a reality. We gratefully acknowledge the extensive and, in many cases, continuing contributions of the following people to NEESgrid: Daniel Abrams, Kazi Anwar, Sung Joo Bae, Jean-Pierre Bardet, Cristina Beldica, Joe Bester, Jeremy Birnholtz, Michelle Butler, Randal Butler, Chris Cribbs, Mike D'Arcy, Shirley Dyke, Jim Eng, Gregory Fenves, Filip Filippou, Thomas Finholt, Ian Foster, Joseph Futrelle, Jeff Gaynor, David Gehrig, William Glick, Glenn Golden, Scott Gose, Gullapalli, Joseph Hardin, Tomasz Haupt, Erik Hofer, Dan Horn, Paul Hubbard, Erik Johnson, Anand Kalyanasundaram, Carl Kesselman, Sung Jig Kim, Young Suk Kim, Samuel Lang, Robert Lau, Kincho Law, John Leasia, Lee Liming, Doru Marcusiu, Francis McKenna, Dheeraj Motwani, Nancy Moussa, Jim Myers, Narutoshi Nakata, Laura Pearlman, Gojkhan Pekcan, Jun Peng, Chase Phillips, Joel Plutchak, Kathleen Ricker, Lars Schumann, Charles Severance, B. F. Spencer, Jennifer Swift, Suzandeise Thome, Von Welch, Terry Weymouth, Guangquiang Yang, and Nestor Zaluzec.
For helping give us a clearer picture of where NEESgrid fits into the bigger landscape of research community cyberenvironments, as well as for their patient willingness to provide us with the occasional "sanity check," we would like to thank Danny Powell and Jim Myers of NCSA. For taking
the time to read and offer helpful comments and suggestions, we'd like to thank Jerry Hajjar of the Department of Earthquake and Civil Engineering at UIUC and Charles Severance of the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
And finally, for providing us with her unique and invaluable point of view as a funding agency representative, as well as her personal support for the writing and eventual dissemination of this document, we would like to thank Joy Pauschke of the National Science Foundation.
1Users and technologists need each other to succeed (7)
2You must have a target and know how to reach it (9)
3Leadership should be a partnership between technologists and domain specialists (15)
4Effective project management is essential at all levels (19)
5Communication is crucial (21)
6Good software development practices need to be established (30)
7Experiment-based software deployment is effective for helping users to own the software (33)
8Cyberinfrastructure is a living entity (35)
Overview
This paper describes important lessons we have learned through our experiences in community cyberenvironment development, and specifically, through our experience developing one of the first large-scale community cyberenvironments. That network was the NEESgrid, which connected earthquake engineering researchers throughout the United States and the world with each other and with experimental apparatus, enabling them to breach disciplinary and geographical barriers to deliver innovative solutions to seismic safety problems.
Like the contents of so many books and articles about project management, most of the lessons set forth here may seem, at first glance, to be common sense principles, and we do not wish to imply that our conclusions are somehow entirely new. But
小燕子穿花衣简谱cyberenvironments are breaking new ground. What we learned with NEESgrid and subsequent similar projects is born of practical experience. We hope that, as more research communities see how they can benefit from cyberenvironments, they will also benefit from our experience with these large-scale, community-driven projects.
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As an early cyberenvironment, NEESgrid was intended to address the goals of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES)
initiatives. Specifically, these goals included 1) transforming the nation’s ability to carry out earthquake engineering research, 2) obtaining information vital for developing improved methods for reducing the nation’s vulnerability to catastrophic earthquakes, and 3) educating new generations of engineers, scientists and other specialists committed to improving seismic safety. Fifteen earthquake engineering equipment sites with advanced testing capabilities were established under NEES to achieve these goals. Laboratory
Equipment Remote Users: (K-12 Faculty and Students)High-Performance
Network(s)
Laboratory Equipment
(Faculty and Students )Figure 1: The NEESgrid concept.
To insure that the nation’s researchers could effectively use this equipment, equipment sites were to be operated as shared-use facilities, and NEES was implemented as a network-enabled collaborator
y. The overall goal was to enable members of the earthquake engineering community to interact with one another, access unique, next- generation instruments and equipment, share data and computational resources, and retrieve information from digital libraries without regard to geographical location. The portfolio of equipment included new or upgraded shaking tables, reaction wall facilities, geotechnical centrifuges, tsunami wave tanks, and mobile and permanently installed field equipment. At each site, participation by off site collaborators was to be encouraged through advanced teleobservation and teleoperation. Invitations were issued to other national and international research facilities to join NEES.
Two characteristics that made the NEES system integration (SI) team unusual were its size and makeup. While NCSA and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UIUC (CEE-UIUC) provided overall project management and administration, the SI team was very much a geographically distributed collaboration, with key project teams located on the West Coast and throughout the Midwest and the South. However, the heart and soul of NEESgrid was the cooperative relationship between more than sixty applications developers, Grid and cyberinfrastructure researchers, social networking experts, and earthquake engineers at Argonne National Laboratory, Mississippi State University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Stanford Un
iversity, the University of California at Berkeley, UIUC and NCSA, the University of Michigan, the University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Southern California and the Information Science Institute at USC, and Washington University in St. Louis.
NEESgrid brought together a group of prominent, accomplished technologists with experience as principal investigators and team members on research projects of their own. The team included researchers who had developed significant, cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure components, such as Globus and CHEF, as well as similarly novel applications such as eNotebook and OpenSees. However, for most of the team, developing a community-driven cyberenvironment was, in many ways, uncharted territory. NEESgrid was not a conventional single-PI research project. The technologists were being asked to create something that did not exist, to do so on a massive scale, to leverage the expertise of diverse, geographically-distributed individual research teams, gather requirements, analyze them, develop and deploy a system in just three years and on a modest budget, and—perhaps most challenging of all—to do so in close collaboration with a community (the earthquake engineers) that was struggling to understand how it all fit into their world. For this community, the idea of cyberenvironments was entirely new and presented an entirely different, and even more daunting, set of challenges.
In this paper, we have tried to distill what we learned in confronting these challenges. We discuss what worked, what did not, and, in some cases, how we applied these lessons in later projects. Community cyberenvironment development is a rapidly changing field,
and each project and relationship will be unique. We hope that others who find themselves facing similar challenges will find our experience—sometimes painful, but always valuable—to be of use in navigating these unfamiliar waters.
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