Outcomes from CANARIE Users' Forum 2009

CANARIE has convened a multi-stakeholder panel to help shape a vision and implementation plan for a Canadian cyberinfrastructure (CI) strategy.

The call comes after representatives of Canada's research community, who came together at the CANARIE Users' Forum in Banff last month, say it is critical to start advancing a CI agenda in Canada.

Canada, they say, is lagging behind its competitor countries in filling gaps to create a 21st century infrastructure for research and development. Our country needs to move urgently to catch up, they say, and look to the insights gained from the others' experience to perhaps surpass those countries.

CANARIE, Canada's research and innovation network, was identified as a key player in getting the process started and even to work beyond its current mandate to ensure the success of the strategy.

Key results from the forum included:

• A vision for cyberinfrastructure in Canada that will afford the kinds of functionality available to European researchers, but adapted to meet Canadian circumstances.
  
  
• Such a vision is unlikely to come from government and will have to come from stakeholders from multiple communities coming together.
  
  
• A vision that is truly comprehensive of all elements of CI including networks; compute and visualization resources of diverse kinds; middleware; resources for data ingest, analysis and storage; specialized instrumentation; and the people to develop, manage, and evangelize the use of cyberinfrastructure is critical.
  

The forum also addressed the need to integrate CI into the curricula of K-12, college, undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate programs in order that future generations are fully CI literate. Such considerations about education need to be fully incorporated into any pan-Canadian vision for cyberinfrastructure.

Forum participants included university CIOs and technical staff; regional compute consortia executive and technical staff; researchers from a variety of big science projects in the country; researchers associated with CANARIE's NEP funded projects; representatives of private industry; and representatives of the regional optical networks.

CANARIE has since convened a multi-stakeholder panel to develop the CI vision for Canada. A draft vision is to be completed by the fall of 2010 with consultations to occur throughout the fall with a final report by the end of the year.

Read more at www.canarie.ca/news.


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