C.6. Management Plan

The work in this proposal will be managed as an independent research project. The management plan has four key features: (1) Project leadership will be the responsibility of a Steering Committee comprising the P.I., the three Co-P.I.'s, and representatives of IRIS and the USGS. The P.I. and Steering Committee will report directly to the NSF. (2) Project management will be the responsibility of an IT Architect, who will be jointly supported by this project and SCEC. (3) Project organization and execution will leverage on the existing strengths of SCEC, which maintains associations with many representatives of the end-user communities. (4) Project structure will focus on interdisciplinary teams comprising geoscientists and computer scientists. Research teams at SCEC, ISI, and SDSC will generally involve a senior scientist, one or more postdocs, and one or more graduate students.

C.6.a. SCEC Structure and Daily Administrative Management

The management of this project will be built on the existing management structure of SCEC. SCEC will graduate from the NSF Science & Technology Center (STC) program in January, 2002. A proposal has been submitted to NSF/EAR and the USGS for a 5-year continuation of the Center, and the agencies are expected to return a decision on this proposal by May, 2001. The University of Southern California (USC) will continue as the SCEC managing institution, with T. Jordan, the Principal Investigator of this proposal, as the new Center Director. A diagram showing the structure of SCEC and its relationship to the proposed project is given in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Diagram showing the relationship of the SCEC/IT Partnership (black box) to other activities in the SCEC matrix (gray boxes). The Partnership will be managed by a Steering Committee that will be responsible for project planning and will report directly to NSF. Within SCEC, four focus groups (central boxes) will organize the interdisciplinary research needed for the SCEC Community Modeling Environment. Knowledge transfer, education, and outreach will be coordinated through SCEC's CEO office.

SCEC is an institutionally-based organization governed by a Board of Directors representing its core institutions. The fourteen core institutions enrolled in the Center renewal proposal are Caltech, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, San Diego State, Stanford, USGS Golden, USGS Menlo Park, USGS Pasadena, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, University of Nevada, and USC. The Center Director acts as Chair of the Board and the representative of the managing institution (USC). The Center Director is also the Chief Executive Officer of the Center and bears ultimate responsibility for the Center's programs and budget. The Center has an External Advisory Council that serves as an experienced advisory body to the Board of Directors, which comprises a diverse membership representing all aspects of Center activities. Knowledge transfer, education, and public outreach are managed by a Vice-Director for Communication, Education and Outreach (CEO), who supervises a staff of CEO specialists.

The P.I. will be assisted in setting up the subcontracts and other project administrative matters (such as reporting requirements to NSF) by the Vice-Director for Administration of SCEC, John McRaney. Mr. McRaney has been with SCEC since its inception in 1991 and has a national reputation for his administrative skills. The SCEC administrative staff will assist the P.I. in organizing the tutorial workshops and the SCEC/IT annual meeting.

C.6.b. Project Management

The SCEC/IT Partnership will be managed by a SCEC/IT Steering Committee, which will oversee all aspects of this project. Members of the Steering Committee will include the P.I., acting as chair, and three Co-P.I.'s (C. Kesselman, R. Moore, and J.-B. Minster), representatives from IRIS (T. Ahern) and the USGS (N. Field), and the SCEC Information Technology Architect (to be named). The Steering Committee will be responsible for planning all Partnership activities and reporting to NSF on the results of the proposed project. The IT Architect will act as the Project Manager; s/he will coordinate project activities on a day-to-day basis and will be responsible for managing the SCEC Community Modeling Environment.

C.6.c. Project Advisory Council

We will establish a Project Advisory Council to serve as an experienced advisory body to the Steering Committee. The Advisory Council will comprise both geoscience and computer science representatives and will have a diverse membership representing basic and applied research, related technical disciplines, formal and informal education, and outreach. The Council will report to the Steering Committee and will be drawn from academia, government, and the private sector. The Council will meet once per year at the time of the annual project meeting to review programs and plans and prepare a report for the P.I. Council members will be kept informed of project activities and will be invited to participate in all appropriate functions and activities. Summaries of Council reports will be made available to NSF.

C.6.d. Team Approach

The practical implementation of individual tasks, whenever it makes sense to do so, will be accomplished through teams with representatives of both the IT and the geoscience communities. A team will minimally consist of, but not be restricted to, two researchers (graduate students or postdocs) working under the supervision of a senior staff member. Some problems will require creating ephemeral teams, others will create more persistent, perhaps larger, teams. Annual management reviews and workshops will help define and assemble the team in the most flexible and effective way.

For example, the development of distributed data collection support might require a team consisting of a seismology post-doc very familiar with the various SCEC data collection, working with one or more IT graduate students, under the guidance of an IT research staffer for a year. On the other hand, the federation of and access to inhomogeneous and distributed SCEC data collections (seismic, strong-motion, GPS, geologic) might best be handled by a smaller team working for several years.

This team-based approach to the development of the SCEC Community Model Environment will be an evolving process, wherein each community in turn might take the lead on a particular task at hand. In order for this process to converge to a satisfactory product, frequent interactions and assessments will be necessary. The collaboratories enabled by the Grid environment, punctuated by periodic face-to-face meetings and workshops are the basic tools that we propose to apply. Each of the major participating institutions is already equipped with the necessary infrastructure. comeont..

Section C.7: Results of Prior NSF Research

Proposal: Table of Contents

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