ORCI History

ORCI was formed in response to a report to the Vice President for Research and the Vice Provost for Academic Information, produced by the Research Cyberinfrastructure Committee in December 2007. The committee, composed of senior faculty and IT leaders who were chosen based on their acknowledged national expertise and prominence in CI, university administration, and IT leadership, was chaired by Brian Athey and Sharon Glotzer. They suggested that in order for U-M to maintain research competitiveness, leadership in CI, and sustainability of existing CI efforts, it should form an Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure within the OVPR.

After ORCI was formed in September 2008, initial outreach included one-on-one meetings with stakeholders, surveys, and town hall meetings. An interim report to the community, titled “High-Performance Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure: An Interim Assessment of the Demand-Side at the University of Michigan,” was released in May 2009.

Events

In December 2009, ORCI was funded by the National Science Foundation (through a grant to Internet2) to sponsor a free, campus-wide event called Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Days. The report of this successful event identified areas of interest for future campus events. CI Days continues as an annual event sponsored by ORCI.

Special Topics

In the summer of 2010, as part of ORCI’s efforts to better understand opportunities in cloud computing, Traci L. Ruthkoski produced a report titled “Exploratory Project: State of the Cloud, from University of Michigan and Beyond.” (This report was also published as part of the 2010 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom).)

In 2010, ORCI also commissioned a Blue Ribbon Task Force on Research Data Strategy. This Task Force was charged to provide guidance to university leadership on how U-M should approach the increasing demands around managing research data. Their final report was released in February 2011.

In 2011-2012, two task forces — on Cloud Computing and on Data Management — are preparing reports suggesting a strategy for implementing the recommendations found by ORCI’s task forces.

In September 2006, the U-M hosted an NSF-funded workshop on “History and Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures.” The report from that workshop, titled “Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design” summarizes the insights and recommendations from that 3-day event.