Welcome to the NSF Software & Sustainability Workshop Wiki

Indiana University is hosting an NSF-sponsored workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability on March 26 & 27th 2009. We are inviting the submission of position papers from the software and scientific community, to be used as input to the workshop and as a way of identifying additional diverse participants.

Following the workshop, we will document the workshop results to provide insights into creating sustainable scientific cyberinfrastructure software support models. We may also make recommendations to the NSF for future funding programs.

Defining Software Sustainability

If you were to have a test to assess several software projects at various stages of lifecycle, how could you reasonably assess which ones could be called sustainable (based on reasonableness, not certitude)? How does this text work? Reactions? Revisions? Alternate definitions?

Software Sustainability is demonstrating a timely and consistent flow of resources and essential capabilities to produce and maintain software that meets the timely needs of research communities.

List of Workshop Participants

Notes from Plenary Sessions

Notes from BreakOut Sessions

Recommendations and SurveyResults

Project Summary

The National Science Foundation’s strategy for 21st century innovation depends on rapid creation ofsoftware to enable scientific discovery. The NSF workshop report “Planning for CyberinfrastructureSupport?” stated, “CI [Cyberinfrastructure] changes the rules and foundations of the research endeavor across much of NSF. CI software is a new class of artifact that should be the target of explicit design, construction, study, and evolution.” Indiana University proposes a workshop to pursue this type of study. Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability will examine the question “given millions of dollars invested in initiating software development, how is software that will be important to the US research and engineering communities identified, maintained, and supported over years to decades?”

Some software critical for various areas of cyber-enabled research exists in ways that seem sustainable almost indefinitely. The Linux operating system is maintained and sustained through open source community effort and sales of support from companies such as RedHat? and Novell, Inc. Community source software such as Sakai exists through a complex but successful combination of pooled effort, membership dues, and a community source license. Much other critical software supports much smaller communities, however, and exists in a variety of less reliably sustainable states.

The goals of the Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability workshop are as follows:

• Examine software evaluation and adoption models by individual research labs and virtual organizations
• Examine models for long-term software sustainability – the ability to obtain the software one wants with assurance, obtain the information required to use the software, obtain the software and hardware environments required to run the software, and use the software.
• Discuss mechanisms for supporting sustainability, including direct government support, university-funded consortia, open source (with or without commercial support), community source, and commercialization

Questions? Email researchtechnologies@iu.edu.

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