Situating Cyberinfrastructure in the Public Realm: The TeraGrid and XSEDE Projects

We examine the evolution of one NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure organization, the TeraGrid, into its successor organization, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) via a case study methodology with two different frames of reference: virtual organization literature and public management networks theory. Our aim in examining these two projects is to situate the study of cyberinfrastructure in support of basic science in both the virtual organization and public management networks literature. We find that our cases confirm the utility of hierarchy when dealing with complexity and that expert use of ICT for governance tasks improves network capacity, especially when time-tested technologies are available in the environment. These ICT resources can be used for monitoring of both service delivery functions as well as network health. We also note that the establishment of common inter-organizational standards facilitates interoperability between organizations, allowing sustainability and modularity of network members.