Geoffrey M. Brown - US grants

National Science Foundation
Office of Cyberinfrastructure


Proposal # 0829462
PI name Bradley Wheeler
Institution Indiana University
Title ?Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability Workshop?

Project Summary

This workshop proposal targets an examination of sustainability and reusability of software developed, supported, and used by the NSF community. Specifically, workshop goals include: examination of current software evaluation and adoption models by labs and virtual organizations; examination of long-term sustainability models; and mechanisms for supporting sustainability via funding organizations, open source, and commercialization. White papers on these topics and others will be solicited of the community in advance of the workshop. Results from the workshop will be documented, as well as recommendations to NSF. Intellectual merit is identified as the exploration of this topic and a resulting deeper understanding of how we as a country of scientists and educators deal with sustaining community sourced software over the long term. Broader impact is multi-dimensional: in addition to the potential transformative nature of resulting actions and strategies by both the community and funding agencies, the proposal will make explicit funds available for HBCU and MSI participation.

For the past 20 years, CD-ROMs have been the primary media for distributing key economic, scientifi c, environmental, and societal data as well as educational and scholarly work. More than 150,000 titles have been published including thousands distributed by the United States and other governments. Yet no viable strategy has been developed to ensure that these materials will be accessible to future generations of scholars. In the short term, these materials are subject to physical degradation which will make them ultimately unreadable and, in the long-term, technological obsolescence will make their contents unusable. This project will develop practical techniques using off-the-shelf emulators with virtualization software to ensure long-term viability of CD-ROM materials. Although emulation has been widely discussed as a preservation strategy, it suffers from a fundamental flaw, since future users are unlikely to be familiar with legacy software environments and will find such software increasingly difficult to use. Furthermore the user communities of many such materials are sparse and distributed, thus any necessary technical knowledge is unlikely to be available to library patrons. The key objective of this project is to develop the technology and processes necessary to mitigate these flaws and to enable large-scale deployment of emulation by libraries and archives.

This project will develop automation technologies to capture the technical knowledge necessary to install and perform common actions with legacy CD-ROM materials in the form of scripts for performing on-the-fly customization of \generic" emulation environments. The long-term vision is to support a distributed CD-ROM collection, developed by a community of libraries, which enables client workstations to access preserved CD-ROM images through customized emulation environments. The project will explore the costs of developing the scripts necessary to automate the use of specific CD-ROMs and the technologies necessary to enable libraries to pool their resources to create a distributed network preserved CD-ROM materials.

The project is structured as a two-year pilot study that will develop automation tools, apply these tools to a large (several thousand representative set of CD-ROM materials, evaluate the performance of this approach in a distributed environment, disseminate the tools and scripts as software artifacts, and provide statistics for planning the large-scale preservation of CD-ROM materials. The research performed in this proposal will enable libraries and archives to solve a growing problem while reducing the resources required to maintain their collections of removable media. This project provides a foundation for libraries and archives to pool their intellectual resources by providing access to virtual media collections accessed through shared emulators using community generated scripts. The materials whose preservation will be enabled by this project include key scientific and societal data published by United States and other governments as well as cultural and educational materials from many sources. This project will have a significant impact on undergraduate science education by direct mentoring of undergraduate research assistants and providing the opportunity for their involvement in writing and presenting scholarly works.

We face a future in which computational resources at the processor level are "free" with hundreds or thousands of cores, yet we have little idea how to utilize these resources except for well-structured and highly parallel applications. This research aims, in the long term, to provide programmers with the same computing power that Nature exploits to seemingly solve difficult problems efficiently. The dominant programming model in Nature is that of a massive number of "cheap" computing elements collaborating by message passing. One such strategy to solving complex problems is to speculatively pursue many possible solutions in parallel, discarding (partial) computations that lack promise or violate necessary constraints. Unfortunately concurrent speculative algorithms are challenging to develop because of the intermingling of execution paths with concurrency and communication. The goal of this project is to take significant steps towards a theory of speculation for concurrent algorithms and to develop an experimental framework for their development. This research will enable the study of novel applications to utilize the vast computational resources that future processors seem destined to provide.

This project is inspired and informed by recent work on reversible computing which is itself inspired by reversibility in the laws of Physics. Research on reversible concurrency, while illuminating key properties that a system must satisfy (e.g. causal unwinding of communication), has neither yielded models that can reasonably be implemented in a distributed environment nor provided necessary details for a practical language. This project will develop concurrent programming languages that support explicit speculation in concurrent systems using the ideas from reversible concurrent programming to factor out the mechanisms used to realize speculation from speculative algorithms. The project will also leverage ideas from backtracking monad and monad transformers to isolate the interactions between speculation and computation effects including communication, and ideas from process algebras to develop a model for understanding language constructs supporting speculative execution. The research includes experimental work to implement and test linguistic constructs and theoretical work to provide both formal models for these constructs, and algebraic tools to enable reasoning about programs that utilize them.

The objective of this project is to enable archives and libraries to securely deliver born-digital materials to networked patrons. Examples of such materials include commercial and academic publications such as interactive CDROMs as well as the archived materials of citizens. Archives are increasingly accepting disk drives or even entire computers, yet access to such materials requires the use of obsolete software designed for archaic platforms. Further, access to these materials may be restricted to authorized researchers. This project will project will make it possible to deliver such materials over the Internet while retaining institutional control. This will provide further access to materials, many of which may be products of Federally funded research.

This project will develop and evaluate viable emulator architectures supporting remote access to born-digital materials while addressing three major issues: (1) portability and maintenance of emulator platforms, (2) principled control of required system software, and (3) principled control of digital artifacts. The definition of "principled control" may vary with the materials being accessed -- from copyright control, to secure access to sensitive materials. This project will weave together existing technologies (e.g. trusted platform modules) in potentially novel ways to solve a pressing societal problem.

The goal of this project is to develop, test, and deploy novel sensors that will enable the study of activity and migration of small songbirds (20-50 grams). The sensors required for such small animals require weight and energy budgets (1 gram and 1 micro Watt, respectively) below most low-energy devices and must survive in challenging environments and collect useful data over many months. This project has the potential to significantly impact the science of animal behavior because many important species cannot be effectively monitored with existing technologies -- for example roughly half of bird species weigh less than 50 grams.

While the focus of this project is to develop the technologies that will enable other researchers to study the behavior of small animals, the project will test these devices on a specific model species (Dark-eyed Juncos) in order to enhance the understanding of the variation of timing on reproduction, migration, and biodiversity. Finally, while the target application for this project is animal biology, many of the fundamental technical problems are common to general low-energy sensing problems. For example, a key problem is detecting the onset of interesting events using extremely low energy levels prior to expending the significantly higher levels of energy needed to collect high resolution data.