Collaboration from the roots up: How the XSEDE project facilitated advanced research computing through large-scale distributed teams
Creators: name: Kee, Kerk
name: Knepper, Richard
name: Snapp-Childs, Winona
name: Jankowski, Harmony
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) represents a successful 11-year large-scale team collaboration between more than a dozen different organizations, providing advanced cyberinfrastructure systems and services to a broad range of constituents. XSEDE was a unique organization in the history of National Science Foundation funding, and ceased operations on August 31, 2022. This ongoing study, which began in December 2021, benefited from the willingness of XSEDE collaborators to discuss their experiences during the project’s waning months. Their frank reflections offer a roadmap for current and future large-scale advanced cyberinfrastructure teams. Our study posits XSEDE as a practical enactment of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a critical-theoretical approach to social science that views sociological structures as intricate webs existing only through the networks of relationships by which they are formed.Our team interviewed participants from across the XSEDE project, identifying elements of their work, ways of working, techniques for collaboration, and productive tensions that support effective formation and maintenance of large-scale virtual organizations in support of research. We proposed to investigate the following overarching questions:What motivated people to participate in XSEDE?How did XSEDE encourage interaction across divisions towards effective collaboration as a single coherent organization?We approached these questions through the lens of ANT, taking a primarily investigative and descriptive approach to query how individuals acting together create functioning structures, like XSEDE. ANT has been used widely in studies of various types of cyberinfrastructure and cyberinfrastructure delivery organizations, as it offers a theoretical basis for the complex interrelationship of humans and technological entities. Studying XSEDE through the lens of ANT allows us to preserve information about its formal organizational structure and the intra-organizational and interpersonal webs that helped it thrive.In the last few decades, several studies addressing the relationship between cyberinfrastructure and human networks have employed ANT as a way to make sense of the intricate web of connections, contacts, and collaborations between humans and computers, while maintaining the agency of each “actant.” Via Bruno Latour and ANT more broadly, Kee and Browning recognize the “agency” of both human and technological actants to influence structures and outcomes, and argue for a consideration of cyberinfrastructure as an interface between humans and organizations (including funding bodies). Randall, Diamant, and Lee draw on ANT to consider how Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) used existing relationships to create new ties that stabilize networks (social and otherwise) within the cyberinfrastructure. Paine and Lee look at various coordinating entities, considering the "overlapping and evolving arrangements scientists use to facilitate data intensive research” through “scientific sociality" in order to render this type of implicit coordination explicit.We posit these connections as a key facet of XSEDE’s success, drawing together a talented staff from across the United States to facilitate a thriving research environment and agenda through large-scale distributed teams. Our paper describes the study's methodology, preliminary results, and goals for future research. It also offers provisional conclusions that, we hope, will push collaborative cyberinfrastructure organizations, and the research it exists to serve, forward.