The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is hosting its monthly colloquium series and invites everyone to participate in the November session. 

Talk Title: Investment in Research-Enabling Cyberinfrastructure Services at Universities Yields a Positive Financial Return to Academia and Society

Abstract:  Many at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign know that NCSA successfully led the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), a powerful collection of integrated digital resources and services, from 2011 to 2022. What is less widely known is that the first two years of the program were bumpy—through no fault of the project leadership.

Two years into the program, one NSF program officer asked for a clear way to answer a recurring question: what was NSF's return on investment in XSEDE?

In this talk, we will revisit that period and the dozen years of analysis of the quantitative, financial return on investment (ROI) for academic cyberinfrastructure. We’ll discuss how XSEDE, as operated by NCSA and its subcontractors, cost the U.S. government less than it would have cost to purchase similar services from commercial sources and how any sort of cyberinfrastructure operated locally by an institution of higher education is less expensive than purchasing services from the open market.

We'll also discuss current research on methods for measuring ROI in any research-enabling infrastructure.

Bio: Dr. Craig A. Stewart has for decades been a leading innovator and strategist in advanced computing and “cyberinfrastructure.” Stewart arrived in 1981 at Indiana University Bloomington (IU) to pursue a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Starting in 1996, Stewart was responsible for IU’s supercomputers, which in 2005, expanded to responsibility for all of IU’s computing services and systems used in support of research, scholarship, and artistic creation. Stewart was involved in the TeraGrid from 2003 to 2010 and was part of the leadership team of XSEDE from 2011 to 2020. He was the PI on the IU Data Capacitor and the initial PI on the IU Jetstream Cloud system. Stewart has long been involved in collaborations and partnerships with NCSA, including TeraGrid, XSEDE, and HathiTrust. Stewart retired from full-time work at IU in 2020 and remains active in research and teaching as Professor (Adjunct) of Computer Science, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University.