Reimagining Research Cyber-Infrastructure: An Enterprise IT Perspective

Once considered a niche group serving a small fraction of faculty using highly bespoke resources, research computing and data management teams are increasingly viewed as a strategic part of campus IT. This is borne out by our experience with providing software and services to research computing groups at over 1,000 higher ed institutions, national laboratories and independent research organizations. We will share emerging best practices adopted by forward-looking institutions that are successfully integrating research cyber-infrastructure with enterprise IT, illustrated by multiple examples. We will describe how advanced software-as-a-service capabilities provided by the Globus team at the University of Chicago can facilitate such a transformation. We will highlight use cases of growing strategic IT importance, including how collaboration may be enhanced by enabling secure sharing of data and computing resources, and how to navigate the daunting challenge of managing data generated by a rapidly growing population of instruments.