CC* CIRA: BRICCs - Establishing Pathways for Regional Computing

Increasing use of advanced computing in academic and research pursuits has encouraged two-year institutions to offer their students and researchers pathways to large-scale computing. Advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) resources are required to support the educators, students and researchers engaged in cloud computing, data-sciences, and related cross-cutting fields such as smart manufacturing offered at these institutions. While community colleges differ in terms of enrollment, demographics, geographical location, business models, and programs offered, the underlying institutional needs to store, access, manage, analyze, compute and curate their data remain the same. By offering a unique collaborative space for regional computing, BRICCs-Pathways will support burgeoning research and education programs in cyber-enabled cross-cutting disciplines at two-year institutions. This award establishes a BRICCs (Bringing Research Innovation to Community Colleges)-Pathways for Regional Computing, continuing and expanding previous planning and multi-institutional engagement activities, but focused around smaller institutions in Texas. BRICCs-Pathways supports these institutions in developing models to advance CI on campus. The project develops scalable and portable frameworks to promote regional computing efforts by (i) promoting collaborations with state agencies, four-year institutions, and national CI center in their region; (ii) analyzing the implementations of networking models; (iii) exploring funded models to understand whether anchor agencies are needed for successful implementation; (iv) leveraging partnerships and assimilated information to assist institutions apply for funding for CI resources; (v) studying the technical computing and network characteristics to find an appropriate balance between network security and research and educational needs; and (vi) exploring means to make computing accessible to researchers and students at these institutions. BRICCs-Pathways alleviates the need for several individual institutional studies by producing workshop reports, implementation studies, shared developed materials, and a set of recommendations to the community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.