 Welcome to another edition of RCE. Again, this is Brock Palin. You can find us online at rce-cast.com You can find us links to the Twitter's the blogs and all the back feeds there of all the old shows also feel free to head over To iTunes leave a comment there rate us give us some feedback. You can also find contact form on the website Again, I have Jeff Squires of Cisco Systems and one of the authors of open MPI Jeff. Thanks again for your time Hey Brock. This is pretty cool So yeah today we are talking to some people from my alma mater we're actually doing kind of a throwback to an RCE cast almost exactly two years ago on hub zero and The nano hub at a Purdue although today we're looking at it from kind of a different perspective because in that episode we talked a Lot about Infrastructure although there's somewhat somewhat of their individual usage as well But today we're gonna be talking to some people out of the University of Notre Dame where I went to school And what they do with a hub zero and a large international collaboration with it So our guests. I wonder if you could introduce yourselves Sure, my name is Jason Zerishan and I'm a research program manager here at Notre Dame in the Department of Biological Sciences and my interest in background is in vulnerability of natural systems to global change and My passion is sort of looking at developing knowledge tools Strategies for aiding in wildlife and natural systems conservation efforts And at the moment I am the program manager for the Collaboratory for adaptation to climate change And hi Brock and Jeff I'm Jessica Hellman I'm a professor here at the University of Notre Dame also in biology get the great pleasure of talking to some biologists today about Computing and research computing and I'm an ecologist by training my area of expertise is In the impacts of climate change and what what we should do about those impacts And that's what we're going to talk to you about today in the Collaboratory for adaptation of climate change and How we can help minimize the effects that climate change is going to bring to all kinds of Systems human systems and ecosystems both Okay, so can you exactly define what you mean by Collaboratory? Sure a Collaboratory is a word that I think it actually is officially defined by the NSF or is an NSF word by origin It means laboratory Online or a co-laboratory, so it's a place where people come together and do work So it's an online community a virtual community a space where things can be where interactions can take place And things work can get done just like a real laboratory You would go into a lab and you would see your colleagues and you would chat about some methodology or you might run an experiment You would keep your results there your data would be posted there and you would get your research work done So for us, we're organizing our Collaboratory or a virtual community around a particular topic That is desperately in need of this sort of rapid innovation that could be inspired by an online community And so we're deploying these distributed computing and cyber infrastructure Toward the development of this particular topic So how did this get get started? but you know kind of both as a general idea the idea of Working virtually with your colleagues across the globe and in a shared virtual space and also specifically at Notre Dame How did the project get started? Well, there are a number of us who work on this topic of what is climate change doing to human and natural ecosystems? And what the heck is that going to mean for us in terms of dealing with those consequences? What is the stuff that we should be doing and it's really interesting if you talk to ecologists and you say all right? Well, okay ecologists. What do you think are too? How should we make managing ecosystems differently than we are now? The we didn't we don't know the answers and if you ask Economists, how should we be managing economic systems differently or you ask public health people? How should we be handling the public health implications of climate change and be just making adjustments accordingly? There's this big sense that we need to be making those adjustments, but no one really knows specifically what to do There aren't any best practices There aren't any sort of core principles about which strategies are more effective than others But at the same time the science is telling us that climate change, you know pretty profound climate change is right around the corner We're already starting to see some consequences. So we need to be implementing these strategies In the here and now so we need the answers and we don't have them So we could ask individual laboratories and we are asking individual laboratories all around the world to go work on this problem And sometimes the pace of that research is something like okay come back in 50 years and tell us what you found But we need something much more rapid than that We need a solution that's developed in one place to be readily implemented in another place We need Information to be shared and we need to mobilize data and tools much more quickly And so that's what in theory an online community can can facilitate it can span that geography So we were working on those issues here at Notre Dame from a traditional laboratory sense but in a really interdisciplinary way With political scientists and lawyers and computer scientists and ecologists and that's when we realized that if we were doing this Locally interacting in an interdisciplinary way on this issue Why couldn't we facilitate that sort of globally or in an online space that wasn't just limited to one campus? But lots of people could participate in so we went to the NSF and we asked them if they liked this idea and they did And so they gave us some money to establish our own Collaboratory and it's not just to establish the Collaboratory and to make it run but also to study what this virtual community is all about So I think we're still learning about how virtual communities function and what roles they can play and our project is just is equally about that Is it is its particular topic? Okay, so you covered a lot of things there But I'm curious is this like a more traditional research project than most the users are graduate students and maybe their PIs Or do you actually maybe have policy makers businesses that would possibly be affected by these Policy decisions or anything like that kind of involved also right, so I'll feel that And I'll start by throwing some data at you some analytics data that we have so just from a numbers standpoint We have 12,000 unique visitors from over a hundred and thirty countries And those folks have come together to form 58 groups on in on our site 37 of which are public 13 have some protected content and eight have are completely private and so who makes up these sorts of these use this user base and It's spread across the gamut of or the spectrum of who might be interested in the topic, which is very interdisciplinary So we do have traditional academic PIs postdocs and graduate students that come both to Consume and leave content on the site as well as to get some of their work done using our tools But we also have a large group of folks who are forming working groups Across agencies federal employees from the Fish and Wildlife Service from NOAA USGS People who are interested in land management like the BLM and state Fish and Wildlife agencies and then also city and governor city government employees like from the city of Chicago And also tribal folks that are trying to unite information across the Native American communities that they've formed something called the tribal climate forum on the site and also as you mentioned industry professionals that are interested in the corporate aspect of adaptation to climate change Yeah, I would say we have a number obviously we have a lot of academics as an NSF project But equally if perhaps more important we have a lot of government and non-governmental people who are actually Responsible for implementing a lot of these adaptation ideas So it's a place in theory It's a place where both the researchers and the practitioners can be interacting with one another Which is another thing you can do in an online space That's difficult to do in real physical space in a collaboratory that you can do that would be hard to do in a real laboratory So how have you actually kind of divided things up? It sounds like there's a number of sub groups people with different interests And of course I need to communicate across But how kind of are you juggling that? So in general these things are sort of Organic they come together We provide a platform and a seed for these people to come together and join groups and consume resources and use our tools We do have some partnerships Organizations that we strategic partnerships with folks at the Nature Conservancy other sort of regional partnerships with folks in the Great Lakes folks at NOAA but in general these folks just find us and Find the site and they bring their own agenda to the site and organize around that Yeah, we have a number of resources a number of tools sort of goodies why people might want to come to the site in addition to the Platform that'll facilitate interaction and group formation and things like this There are some models that are useful in this domain space and other tools and resources that might attract a person initially Now do you provide this service for free or is there some kind of membership? Or is there certain levels that are free and certain that have to be paid? At the moment it is your government tax dollars at work It's run by the funding from the National Science Foundation. So it's completely open source There is no fee to to enter or to participate I think that's very important in the spirit of sort of group problem solving I mean, of course at the moment We're thinking about what is our long-term model and how does it that we can go about sustaining these communities? Keeping them open source and keeping them accessible, but also having a financial model. That's actually something we're confronting right now but at the moment we are Research entity and so we live off of National Science Foundation funds Is can it pretty much be anybody join just kind of like walk up and kind of poke around the communities? Because obviously some of the stuff is somewhat contentious Even though it sounds like you're not even talking about the stuff that's generally contentious But anything like this become highly politicized becomes an issue Right, so we have sort of three core levels of users At the top level we are Google indexed and so that's one way that folks might come and consume information They type in a keyword one of our resources Pops up and they are freely as long as it's available to at sort of the public level They're freely available to Consume that content, but it's a one directional sort of way of Insumption the next level is if you come and you join our community which Jessica mentioned is completely free You just sign up for an account and that opens up a whole nother level where you can leave Information you can post information and resources and if you have a funding opportunity coming up you can post that You might have a webinar that you'd like to let people know about and you can join groups and group formation is really important and Something that sort of sets us apart from a few other sites that are formed around the concept and then There isn't an additional sort of barrier But there is another sort of level of super user that you we we like to think about that are the folks that come to consume our tools so we also Make our tool sets available to folks and those folks are using sort of a lot more of our Computational resources than maybe other folks that are just coming as individuals or as groups Bar can I can I answer your question here about actually makes me think of two things you mentioned this topic is Potentially contentious. I mean it is true that when you come to sign up you You need to get approved as a user that we're not using that to keep people out though. You know, you always have your random Into you know your bots and things like this that are going around creating user groups in it looking to sell Sell various things we don't you know, you're not a genuine user of the community then those don't get approved But we actually have found Hardly any I think none Of that kind of contentious things that you might imagine and it's really interesting the topic of climate change Adaptation and we should be very clear about what adaptation is Adaptation is about all the stuff that people are going to need to do all the ways We're going to need to change our management and the ways that we go about living our society Managing our natural resources and so on to deal with climate change So it definitely requires an understanding of what the impacts of climate change are But in some ways actually less contentious than the flip side of the coin, which is climate change mitigation Which is the stopping reducing and ultimately stopping the release of greenhouse gases the very cause of climate change now it goes without saying that adaptation and mitigation go hand-in-hand that you have to Have I often say if you're going to adapt to climate change you would be a lot more Reasonable and feasible to adapt to a smaller amount of climate change than a large amount of climate change In fact adapting to the amount of climate change the model suggests under our business as usual scenario is probably impossible In part in large parts of the world, but somehow there's an angle to adaptation. That's more sort of what are we going to do that? It seems to be a little less contentious and then another thing you said made me think of What are people coming and doing here? It's really interesting What makes a collaboratory different than just a web page or what makes a virtual community different than a web page a? Web page is just something that people go look at right they might download something from it They're just consuming it's a one-way Interaction you're pushing information across the internet, but a Collaboratory or a virtual community should have a back-and-forth So Jason said we're creating this platform and then we expect and we're seeking people to contribute I mean we seed it with stuff that people might want to consume, but it's not just a web page You come and you contribute and you leave this data footprint or your ideas or your Experiences or your opinions or your groups Behind and that's what forms a community over time So that's a That actually begs a great question. What kind of things have you been able to do with the collaboratory? What kind of science have you been able to advance with these communities? right so within Within that we have a number of sort of research priorities that we are putting forward With this effort through the NSF and I can just sort of briefly detail a few of them Many of them we refer to as tools so a few of our tools include Something that we call spaces which is the spatial portal for analysis of climatic effects on species and Basically, it's a browser-based climate envelope modeling platform that looks at species responses to climate and tries to forecast where they may live in the future and the way that that's novel is that many of these tools although folks in your audience would be probably very capable and Very keen to take on the sort of current state of a lot of climate envelope models out there their command-line tools generally running on either servers or you'd run them when your local Linux setup and you'd be sort of like running these things with requests and Basically, we wanted to take oh, and it's also a fragmented community. There are many platforms and many algorithms out there that you'd be downloading as packages into things like are and MATLAB and You'd have to be interfacing with these things individually and what we've done is created a browser-based multiple Modeler multiple algorithm unified Platform that includes things like GIS like global Geographic information system mapping capability It's got a logical workflow based experiment development system. So Basically, we are trying to make these things both accessible to folks and to also to Build a community that's more unified around these tools another one of our efforts that we've put forward is taken some efforts of Group called nature serve and we've adapted one of their tools the climate change vulnerability index from something that was running a very complex Bayesian statistics in an Excel spreadsheet and We've created it as a Java virtual machine based tool that runs within the Collaboratory which asks probing questions about species natural history So you're working on a particular frog and it'll ask you questions about that frog And then at the end it sort of spits out a score as and some sub scores as to what might be Concerning to that particular species under climate change and then it that it then chucks that into a globally accessible database and you can imagine over time as folks Participate in in adding their species to this database. It is a real Valuable tool to land managers all over the world who are looking at Responding at taking actions and conservation actions in response to climate and we've not only made that then we've brought it out of Sort of people's desktops and lost data sets that are just sitting in people's hard drives made it globally accessible But there's also in session screens sharing so as you're going through using this tool You can say I'd like to invite invite Brock and Jeff to come look at what I'm doing here And they can help tick the boxes and write the responses Later you can say oh in addition. I'd like to request This other expert as a peer reviewer and when you type their name into the Into the shared session peer review box and they are then pink to come and and review your entry For scientific validity or maybe add some comments and things like that and then We're also involved in structured decision support tools. So we Call those adaptation workflows which basically guide users through a thought process and point them at resources and tools our internal discussion forums and Help folks think about in a very structured way How to think about various parts of climate adaptation so a couple examples of those we have Guide to coastal resilience in the Great Lakes that asks People questions and points to some NOAA tools and things like that and then the sort of most novel part of that is it then says Do you want to talk about this with other people that may have the same interest here? Let's pop you into this discussion forum That's part of a group and you can relieve your questions or answer questions that you might have Right there in that forum. And then finally as Jessica mentioned One of our biggest aspects that we're interested in research from a research perspective is that we're studying the Sociology and the network science of how our members come together and create connections and what that emergent collaboration Signal might be so basically we're evaluating how communities are formed and the interactions between members and other communities And to do that we're utilizing click-stream analytics that we're collecting on the site and also doing some direct Membership surveys and that's one of our more interdisciplinary Pursuits and that we're bringing in people from our Center for Network Analysis here on campus and Some computer science folks, but we're also heavily leveraging our strong sociology Faculty members on campus. So it's a big package of Science that that the NSF has really facilitated here on campus So all those tools help you visualize what the future might be like and then you need to make decisions about What you do about what that future might be like So you could imagine Once you have information about what what possible outcomes there might be for the future Then you decide how you're going to manage in the face of that and that's where the discussion part comes in and Decision-making and problem-solving Okay, so let's let's dive in a little bit of the practicality here When people join You said you've got these different levels of users some just joined or just come to read some join to use your tools Some you'll you know join just to discuss What data do people tend to share, you know, are they is it is it just like a mailing list kind of thing where? They're tossing ideas and and theorems round or do they say hey, I've got this data set Have a look at it. What do you come up with? I mean what kind of interaction goes on? between the actual collaborators Right, so in terms of what types of things people are sharing all of our all of the things that you call data we call resources, so a Resource from within the concept of the Collaboratory can be a number of things case studies webinars government reports Publications working documents things like that and of those we have a ton. We have almost a thousand global resources And then you but you may not want to have those globally accessible so or it may be more topical So we also have the ability to share things just within your group. So you may be creating a wiki That's knowledge generation within your group only and you might restrict that down if or if you're trying to put out a You're having a conference and you're putting out conference flyers to organize people That's something that you might have for the group or sources And then we also allow people to have a personal workspace and this is basically conducted through Linux virtual machine and we give everybody who joins 10 gigabytes of personal storage to share Date like literal data sets ones and zeros with each other Through their for through their public and private storage. So there are lots of different ways that users can share data But you know Jeff It's kind of it's kind of interesting because we're asking people to do something. It's a little bit different than they're used to Right. I mean we said earlier a Collaboratory is like this place where people come and interact but laboratories by analogy are places where usually you kind of keep your data to yourself and Some of these data that people might be coming in running in a model, for example might it's not necessarily data that you'd be readily Excited to share with other people So we're we deal with that by both having public information and private information if you want to keep it private But it's a fascinating. I think it's fascinating to think about how should people behave in these Collaborative spaces and what should they be willing to share because our assertion is this that the innovation really actually comes from the Sharing and the collaboration But sometimes people just want to come and use resources without sharing that information and we want to facilitate that too So it's an interesting New space we're in in terms of what does it mean to share? I mean for some of our people are even government agencies Maybe they're not interested. You know, maybe they have information that they're nervous about sharing So they can also make it private Yes, it seems like a delicate line that you must have to tread because All research not just academic research, but all research is highly competitive these days and and I'm actually a Big open-source guy myself and so I'm a big believer in working together with people and you get your best work done that way But it's sometimes an uphill battle to convince people of that particularly when you're all competing for the same research dollars from NSF and the the same types of Research funding organizations. Do you run into any kind of resistance that way? I don't think we Honestly, we run into more resistance when people will talk about it than when they actually go and interact on the site We hear a lot that there are people are concerned about sharing information But for example, if you go into some of these groups, you'll find that there's a surprising amount of stuff that they will make public Or that their groups are pretty loose And pretty big and they'll share information pretty readily within a group So I'm not sure how You know manifesting reality this concern is about not wanting to share I think that people are sort of nervous about the concept more than the reality but The other thing is to what degree is the community used to sharing and what's the incentive for sharing? It's it's a little bit of a chicken and a neg I mean the proof would be it the proof would be born out later if we said look at this great insight that happened Because everyone was in this virtual community and there was some sharing happening and I think that that actually will bear out over time But it's a little bit hard to to prove to people that that will be the case and and that they should play their part in helping Make that a reality. I suspect it's the same thing for you in the sort of open-source domain You know, why should people go along with this? We have this philosophical idea that it will spur innovation and it will increase the pace of development But you don't really realize until after it happens And competition motivates people sometimes also, you know, and it's not you know We talked about competition a lot of times in the economic monetary sense, but in academia. I think we kind of trade in Recognition and you know things like that that I think sometimes people They're both incentives matter incentives matter incentives always matter And so creating a setup what I see you've done here and tell me if I'm off base Is that traditionally when people talk about you know sharing data to somebody else? It's very one-way Yeah, yeah, and so it like it never comes back around But if you're like all inside the ecosystem that thing that was the permutation off of your previous data you now see That's right another Thing talking about incentives right a thing contributions on the platform are attributed to individuals so you get credit for all the stuff that you post up there in in the sense of Recognition for your posts. I mean credit on your resume or something might be a separate issue, but So we're also cultivating a brand in some senses and we we want to think of ourselves as we and we do think of ourselves As a one-stop shop on this topic So there's also a bit of an issue that if you're working in this area You want your information to be up there because that's where other people going to find it So, you know if you're going to be competitive in this space you need to be present where where the action is happening But to be that place where people want to be you need to have a reputation and critical mass So kind of what was part of kind of getting to that point For us is really has all been rooted in real interactions with real people That get the spark going and Jason can comment on this But there's actually a literature that suggests it that Online interactions at least in our parallel cases are probably best suited for reinforcing Interactions that have established In person right this is the classic Facebook thing, you know your Facebook's with friends mostly with people that you actually know Or have some history with and so we've actually over time drifted toward that model From imagining that we're going to spark these random collaborations to trying to focus on reinforcing some Existing linkages and making them stronger or putting groups of people together who who could or know each other or sort of know Each other or having a third-party in common and forging those linkages Right so the site Has the real advantage of being tag-based and so everything right down to your personal profile has tags And those tags are searchable so if you search in for any any keyword that you're interested in you're gonna get a list of resources tools and people that are Interested in or relevant to that topic And so that's one way that people who are what we sort of think of as coming as Singletons to the to the group if they were to search and they could find their tribe in that way But as Jessica mentioned One of the real ways that this gets done in you know in the wild is People come with existing relationships that they then sort of knit together and they say you know what? You know here's my card we should talk more in the future and the problem with that is folks come Probably we've noticed two regional conferences and things like this and they have intense very productive Relationships and knowledge generation and then they go away and then for six to nine months or maybe a year or longer That relationship isn't really stoked and we're thinking what can we do to make that sort of secondary next day? after the conference interaction more Well facilitated and more productive so that's where we want to be in that space So let me flip the the situation around on you so If if the Collaboratory is what happens after a physical meeting or a physical conference or something Has it happened the other way around? Has it happened that? Work together in the Collaboratory has created a conference or created a work meeting a physical work meeting where people actually get together and and Collaborate do science. Yeah, absolutely. So we do have cases like that Maybe not completely organically But there have been the it is the case that we have a few Groups on the site that have come together and created new collaboration and relationships One of which is called the Northwoods adaptation group And so this is a bunch of folks that live in or Great Lakes region that are thinking about Forest management conservation things like that and they've just said, you know what? We need a way to put people in touch with other people that know things about this region. And so that's one good good example, there's another that's Sort of slightly different topically Called Great Lakes coastal communities and these are Basically, if you look at it from from a number of different levels of government down to People who are doing city planning down to citizens Thinking about promoting adaptation in Great Lakes regions to Great Lakes coastal region. So there are definitely Thing groups that have come together and formed just uniquely on the Collaboratory that have been very interesting What have you seen in terms of anything kind of being spun off to the side? Like things are kind of outside the Collaboratory, but never would have happened without the Collaboratory Hmm That's an interesting question It's a little bit hard to answer because at the same time that the Collaboratory is growing and evolving though Very topic is growing and evolving this idea of You know, we're really on Addressing a really emerging topic. So there are certainly conversations and groups of people on the Collaboratory that have been thinking about Adaptation and pursuing innovative ways of thinking and talking about it And then you can see those manifests in other places as well at conferences at meetings In some of these work groups that are Manifest on the Collaboratory and they also have a sort of real-world analog So it's hard to say that which of those are actually directly triggered by the Collaboratory I don't know. Maybe you have additional thoughts on that Jason, but I think that during the period of time that the Collaboratory sort of been in business There's been a number of sort of shifts and ideas about what it is that we're trying to To manage for when we talk about climate change annotation You can see that both in the real world and on the Collaboratory I could give you an example if you're interested, but You've stumped me a little bit there with that question That's a really interesting question. Sorry. I know this is probably not going to make it in but We ought to see if we could figure that out. How will we go about determining? So one of the things that about our project is where I said we said the NSF wanted us to study this virtual community We said here's a topic area that needs a virtual community We should establish this cyber infrastructure and then we said and then we're going to study those people and see what they actually do What we should come up with is a way of investigating What's the parallel between the online world and the offline world? And which is the chicken and which is the egg? I think it's an interesting thing to think about Also sort of within the online world We there are a number since we begun our work here On the Collaboratory there are a number of sort of parallel sites that are topically oriented that we think of ourselves as Helping to connect those different resources together and so in that way they Some of their members are members of the Collaboratory and some aren't but We're trying to help be the nexus And try and link to each of these different resources that otherwise may sort of fall to the wayside and we have Because we're NSF funded. We don't really have an agenda in that way So some of these places may get their dollars from a very specific research agenda or from donors and we don't really have that Problem so in in that way we can be very altruistic even when altruism seems like it may be lost All right. Well, let's let's talk a little more about the logistics of this in case uh, there are other people out there Looking to set up their own kind of Collaboratories for their own Topics now you use the the hub zero platform. What what can you tell us about that? Do you use the the free software or do you use any paid versions of it? How does that all generally go Right, so we are using the open source non paid version and we're hosting it here through the center for research computing on campus and in terms of any of their things I like to say, um, our our site is free both like free stuff And also free like speech, right? So, um, we we're completely open source and all of our tools are also open source and available for tweaking and and looking and collaboration in that in that way so We do use what they are calling their sort of workspace, which is an app or we like to call a tool And that's what fuels a few of the tools that I mentioned like the open modeler and this climate change vulnerability index and also the tool forage So that's something that uh, one of your previous guests nano hub really utilizes quite a bit and we are interested in bringing folks on board that are also similarly interested in developing tools for this topical space as well So that means people can develop code and actually executed in the In the platform The main way at the moment, we've primarily been doing tool development with with close collaborators And the main hub zero Platform that we use is all the infrastructure they have about group formation and managing user id's Uh messaging this kind of thing So how difficult have you found that to be to kind of make these applications you mentioned a couple that You know you ported from excel to java to make it work inside this environment Um, this seems like a bit of a barrier Like you you can't just use the tool of your choice because it needs to fit inside the hub zero setup has how has that actually worked out for you We've sort of bounced back and forth if it if it tends to if we can see a way to leverage the platform that the hub zero platform is fantastic Uh because it allows for some of this remote screen sharing of any tool that's sort of natively built on the hub zero platform and It also sort of fits really nice into the ecosystem where sort of all of your sessions So um the jvm java virtual machine Platform you can have multiple instances all running at one time. So let's say I need to model 10 species I can get my first run started say save that for later. It goes away I pull up my next virtual machine. I get something started in there I say save that for later then I go to another tool and I started over there So those are really powerful and we really uh appreciate what that what hub zero brings to to the game there But then we've also bounced outside and our spaces platform is completely developed just by us And is running not within necessarily the hub zero app Ecosystem, but is still running on the collaboratory and our crc infrastructure We have an additional challenge if if I could add on to that And that is that we have we're engaging a community of people that are not software developers So, um We are working toward and I think it'll take some time to get people to imagine that they would not only come And run their tools and have conversation inform group groups and share PDFs and Data they have a lot of biological data, but they would actually Make code and share executable files and Um build new things to contribute. I think it's actually been a big challenge for us. Um And what what is the what would incentivize that for our community? It's not a completely natural thing to be spending your time doing so One thing we're really looking for is who what kind is there a development community out there that might want to Engage on this topic. I think that could be a lot of productive things in that area So you've mentioned the the crc a couple times there at Notre Dame and and they also host a bunch of High-performance computing stuff, which is a topic we visit in this podcast quite a bit And that's my particular field and Brock's particular field as well. So i'm curious Do you use any of those type of resources? Do you run? Big parallel number crunching kinds of things And make that available through the collaboratory The reason why we're prepared on this is because the answer is You don't really need high-performance computing for a lot of the things that the collaboratory does But you can use it when it's all right time to Right the crc provides a ton of our infrastructure And facilitates us to do some of this parallel computing. So the crc itself has over Almost 20,000 cores that they're using for hpc 350 terabytes of storage and we're a member of another Guest that you've had on I believe in the past the open science grid So the we do utilize that we are part of their main What we fit into what they call their interactive collaborative environment group which works on things like malaria and Things like Democracy propagation and other things that take a lot lots of parallel computing and high performance computing And from an infrastructure point of view, we are part of the monon 100 100 gigabit System that is between us and indiana university for really high bandwidth Data sharing and then our campus infrastructure is 10 gigabit. So we do have the ability to really push push a lot of data up and down via The Infrastructure when we need to and we're investigating and moving forward We have the ability to deploy some of these jobs to our local condor distributed computing pool so We can send our jobs out across the campus network to computers that are not being used at the moment and They could be run sort of on that network as well So you mentioned that uh when someone signs up which is completely free and they come and do they get 10 gigs of Free space to be able to upload and share real data and they can use these tools and stuff How does Notre Dame actually feel about this? You know right now you're supported by the grant but you're talking about going to the local condor pool and stuff That effectively you would now have open the door to anybody to use resources that they're paying for So that's right. I mean this is a project. So money comes from the nsf. This is a commitment the university made to enable this Uh project to happen Uh, so we are very explicitly allowing people to use computing resources provided by the university of Notre Dame In fact, that's one of the reasons why you would come and use the Collaboratory in the first place. I mean we talk about It's where the community dimension of the collaboratory is important that you would come and interact with other people And a lot of that's probably not very data intensive and it doesn't involve a lot of storage space But for example, some of these models that you might come and run Uh individuals might use this resource Because they don't have a lot of computing power at their local machine or they're not part in some case They're not part of a university that has any Hypo high performance computing capacity So it gives you access to resources that some individuals might not have it also puts it in a in a visual platform that sort of intuitive use and Works well for a variety of different levels of Um comfort if you will with high performance computing And in exchange, uh, I mean this is part of what what the university is Intended to do the university has made a commitment to sustain The Collaboratory for at least five years after the funding stream from the National Science Foundation ends Which it will end in the coming year Uh, so we'll continue to host the Collaboratory But as I say we're looking for and thinking about what is our 2.0 And how you know with the business model moving forward To be able to provide those resources in the long term hosting continuing to host it for a while It's not a huge challenge for the university But for us to continue to be able to pursue development of it and keep it fresh and new And put be able to deploy new tools as they come online Is going to require a continuous flow of resources What about insurance companies? I mean, they're the ones who are possibly viewing, you know For any sort of information come here could actually be related to other things dealing with property Insurance that's possibly not even necessarily related to climate change There is a number of potential business models One could imagine a kind of consulting firm So for example, we have pretty good knowledge of our own tools and how to use them Maybe there's a business model in there about Uh while our information is freely available, we certainly have Skills in accessing those models and seeing them used in a good way You know another business model for these kind of communities again, not what we've developed so far But is to have some things be public private and some things be public another resource to be private That's not something we've pursued so far Yeah, there there are a variety of potential Opportunities in which you could sort of make pieces of this Commercialized in some way or have a fee for service type of entity But it is kind of interesting to think about what is the relationship Of an entity like ours or hub zero in general hub zero remember was funded by the national science foundation You mentioned earlier is the project based at Purdue University They're funding from the nsf ended And now they have a fee model as well Though if we very much explicitly in our grant proposal said we were going to use hub zero because it was developed with Um government resources and was an nsf funded project So I think it's also part of our responsibility to Maintain a part of our community in our environment that is publicly accessible So you you've mentioned a couple of things one of which uh was very interesting I I keyed on you said it was not difficult for Notre Dame to keep hosting this for the next several years And that they've provided that commitment. So again, I want to ask on the flip side of that what are some of the challenges that you've run into in Creating developing and maintaining this community I think one of the biggest challenges is something that we briefly touched on previously, which was really Uniting on a common at a common level the computer savvy Of the community so um and maybe not even the computer savvy per se But the sort of the culture the culture of leaving a latent evidence of your participation, which is Fantastic for the global good, but may not be something that a government agency is in The business of doing without having it be peer reviewed and go through specific back channels and things like this so um I think and then further than that even Somebody like a giant like google and facebook have a hard time Making those primary interactions happen that aren't just secondary interactions after a face-to-face. So we're having uh a lot of folks that come that sort of know each other but uh and and form groups around that but Uh in in this day and age. We really have a this is a global issue that spans A huge Spatial gradient here. We're talking about uniting people across continents that um and one of the things that the collaboratory can really do in sort of um A very effective way is bring somebody from uganda Virtually and put them in contact in contact with somebody from the university of chicago that That alone and putting that sort of intellectual resource We're very spoiled here in the states where I can get on an airplane And within a few hours be to the doorstep of a leading researcher on pretty much any topic in the world And that's just not the case for folks in disadvantaged. Uh, maybe spatially remote countries. So it's really central to our our Our thought process also that we we need to unite people over space as well as uh around an idea So I want to kind of talk about some of the experiences you've had and we've talked about a little bit but I want to specifically If someone else was trying to kind of create a community around a broad topic like this Where there's there's a large community. It's dispersed. It's worldwide. Maybe only nationwide something like that What would be some of the things that you say make sure you get right? That's a that's a fascinating question So I would say a couple of things first you really need to find out how savvy Your community is and how tolerant they are Of the sort of beta version, right? How how much are they expecting to get the whizbang stuff the very first time they show up So a surprising we spent a surprising amount of time Dealing with people saying having concerns like well, I went to your site and I couldn't find the button for whatever and so I left So that's again They come back to that face-to-face thing if people are committed to working with you on your site because they Have a group there and they were told to go and do something in that group or join up Then they'll be persistent but uh In some cases if you could if they come once You know, how do you get them to stay and engage? And we found in our community that they have a pretty high standard for a a nice looking aesthetically pleasing easy to use site You could imagine other communities. Maybe it would be more tolerant, but but ours that's a big one. So The other is to we would we would think carefully about why are people there? What are they looking for? And we we've thought a lot about what we could what we could use to attract them there So in our case, for example, a big seller has been information about grants And jobs people are looking for grants and jobs So a lot of people have come to our site to consume that information And then you think about how do you convert them into users or how do you convert them into people who will Contribute as well as just consume. That's an important a critically important thing to think about Uh, so what is their incentive for visiting the site? And then I think the third one is how which we are still trying to figure out I think it's important for these virtual communities is you have a lot of these individual interactions But what's the collective value that you can draw out of that? We're thinking about that a lot as our NSF project is coming to a close, you know, what's the take home picture from this virtual community? You built this thing and lots of people came but what's the insight that you're now going to Glean from it and I think that's something important to think about From the beginning also Jason if you would add others Yeah, I guess I would just add that uh, it's also in process and that you know That is a cornerstone of of what makes this grant interesting is that it's topical But we also have the you know, it's it's both Um The topic of study and a topic of study We're we are actively pursuing Looking at this little ecosystem and trying to answer those very questions as we speak So as you have grown and evolved the site, do you roll out new features new tools new Things that people would come to come for I mean not just the content that people share But you as administrators provide new functionality. Does that happen over time? And if so, can you give us a sneak peek of some things that are coming? Absolutely, we do Have an active team of developers that are working on our tools and one cool part of that is that The community really dictates where those go. So part of uh, the central aspect of Of hug zero is that they offer for all tools they offer what's called a community wish list and just like other uh Other software development platforms when you go to any one of our tools You can join a join a group that is uh associated with that tool and you can say, you know what I You know, I'm using this tool and it's fantastic You know what you could do differently this and then once you've submitted that as a as a wish list we'll come back and our our Development team will take a look at it and we'll either approve it or we'll Put it on the back burner and then these things get voted up and down by the community And so we really follow that and follow the heartbeat of the community when uh, when we're prioritizing our development hours that our our team is looking at we just sort by the highest ranking And kind of go go from there. And then uh, like I mentioned before about some of the distributed computing stuff Um, that's just one of our tools open modeler Supports that distributed computing through condor through a sort of internal setting, but we're really looking at uh Deploying that more uh broadly across um our spaces tool and one cool thing that we have going on cyber infrastructure Wise is that we have what we call the green cloud here at the crc, which is a condor based Computing node that actually the heat from those servers Warm the south bend botanical gardens greenhouses And so we think it'd be kind of a neat way to Integrate those two things together we'd be utilizing these 40 000 cores one chunk of the that being going to something a little bit green as well And with that let's uh, find out what everyone's been waiting for. What's the actual site for the collaboratory? Great question The collaboratory for adaptation to climate change. It's easier to remember. It's adapt dot nd dot edu uh ad apt at dot nd for Notre Dame Dot edu And you can find us at facebook facebook.com slash adaptation Collaboratory where you can sort of keep up to date with all of the things that we're doing across the whole platform And we'd like to connect with Folks that have good ideas because that's what we're in the business of doing Okay with that. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for your time jessica jason Thank you. Jeff and brock. We really appreciate it. Thanks a bunch