Scaling Research Frontiers: Building Portable, Reproducible Environments for the Modern PI

The gap between departmental "shadow IT" and centralized Research Computing is widening, often leaving Principal Investigators (PIs) struggling to move workloads from local labs to national grids or the cloud. This session explores the use of containerization and open orchestration standards to create a "frictionless research" environment. By focusing on portability and reproducibility, institutions can empower researchers to focus on science rather than system dependencies. We will discuss how a standardized, open standards approach facilitates multi-institutional collaboration and satisfies increasingly stringent federal data mandates for research reproducibility.