XSEDE Technology Investigation Service (TIS)

The Evaluating and Enhancing the eXtreme Digital Cyberinfrastructure for Maximum Usability and Science Impact project, known as the Technology Investigation Service (TIS), was a collaboration between University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, The University of Texas at Austin Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Tennessee National Institute for Computational Sciences, and University of Virginia which identified and evaluated potential technologies to close the gap between the XSEDE (http://www.xsede.org) service offerings and the needs of XSEDE users. This project was funded by the NSF Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (award ACI 09-46505) in response to the "Technology Audit and Insertion Service" component of the "TeraGrid Phase III: eXtreme Digital Resources for Science and Engineering (XD)" solicitation (NSF 08-571). Over the project lifetime the two major goals of TIS were: 1) identifying, tracking, evaluating and making recommendations of new technologies to XSEDE for consideration of adoption and 2) raising awareness of TIS to XSEDE and other stakeholders to solicit their input on technologies for consideration for evaluation. In accomplishing the goals, the following four significant outcomes from TIS resulted: the development and deployment of the XSEDE Technology Evaluation Database; the development of the significantly improved XSEDE software search capability; the technology evaluation process; and the evaluations performed along with their corresponding technology adoption recommendations to XSEDE. This paper highlights the life-cycle of the TIS project, including lessons learned and project outcomes.