The High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) communities face unprecedented challenges as they seek to effectively execute the next generation of experiments involving hundreds to thousands of collaborators around the world. The very success of these experiments will critically depend on sustaining vigorous geographically distributed collaborations that are coherent, efficient and effective while accessing, processing, and sharing Petabyte-scale data. This has never been done before and there are serious concerns that the science emerging from these projects will be limited by the absence of robust tools to make such large-scale, highly interactive collaborations possible. We seek to address these challenges by developing and deploying a collaborative environment, called the Grid-Enabled Collaboratory for Scientific Research (GECSR), that both integrates existing technologies and develops innovative new technologies that will be readily adopted by the target communities.

GECSR will combine the best open-source applications from within the HENP communities (and from allied Grid and National Middleware efforts) within a common portal interface. To ensure that the capabilities of the GECSR meet the needs of target users, we will follow an iterative development model that in each cycle will include systematic assessment of user requirements, tool development and deployment consistent with requirements, and evaluation to determine whether deployed tools will satisfy requirements. A distinguishing feature of this approach is that the combination of expertise in physics, computer science, and social science will greatly enhance the chances of both technological and sociological success. Institutions in our proposal have established track records of international leadership in each of these areas.
The recent report of the NSF Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure identifies five key service categories that will provide a foundation for the comprehensive knowledge environments that will enable individuals, teams and organizations to revolutionize scientific practice. The HENP community, working with computer science and communities in astrophysics and other disciplines, has addressed four of these services, based largely on common underlying middleware, in the widespread deployment of grid-enabled high performance computing resources, and through several data grid projects. The proposed Grid-Enabled Collaboratory for Scientific Research will provide the collaboration services, the fifth of these service elements of cyberinfrastructure, that is required for the HENP community to fully realize a functionally complete environment, with the potential to significantly transform the conduct of research.

Broader Impact
This proposal is distinguished by a tight integration between 1) the science of collaboratories, 2) a globally scalable working environment built on the foundation of a powerful fully functional set of working collaborative tools, 3) an agent-based monitoring and decision-support system that will allow collaborating scientists to perform data intensive analysis tasks efficiently, and 4) an education and outreach agenda that is inclusive of minorities, and reaches high-school physics programs through vehicles such as QuarkNet and CHEPREO and success models such as ThinkQuest. Assessment of the methodology of scientific collaborations and the iterative evaluation of the tools by a team independent of the developers will be a critical element ensuring the success of the proposed work and insuring its value beyond HENP.
 
The broader implications of this proposal, and its mission to grant full partnership to groups in all world regions, are driven by (1) the right of groups and governments that have contributed to the global Collaborations to share and collaborate in the data analysis, and thus in the process of search and discovery that is at the root of all basic research. (2) the need to justify global projects, and global Collaborations as a valid and vital means of conducting future leading-edge scientific research and other endeavors, without exploitation of the poorer nations and world regions and (3) the need to develop effective means of collaboration and cooperation among sub-groups with vastly different academic and cultural backgrounds, and especially to allow effective collaboration by university-based students in the native cultural milieu of their home countries. Six percent of this proposal’s budget is allocated to Education and Outreach that specifically targets minority populations: this should produce a sea change in how high energy physics experimentation, and the necessary global collaboration, impacts the quality of science education and addresses the needs of underserved populations across the US, and around the world.