Dr Jay Black and Dr Steven Liss, co-chairs, the Leadership Council for Digital Infrastructure

Building Canada's advanced digital infrastructure

By Dr Jay Black and Dr Steven Liss

Canada is at the cusp of an historic opportunity as new computational paradigms emerge and data become more massive, more available, and more complex. This cuts across all disciplines and fields, and is changing the speed at which we work, how we work, and what we can accomplish. The competitive advantage of our research community is increasingly affected by these developments, but Canada's limited ability to support a growing digital economy requires a proactive response.

We have a strong foundation from which to grow our position as a global leader in the knowledge economy. Canadians are among the best in the world at creating, interpreting, visualizing, and manipulating data. And currently, Canadian researchers, students and industry have access to extensive computing capabilities, ultra-high capacity networks, sophisticated data management, and highly trained personnel to manage the system.

However, our ecosystem is strained, lacks an overarching national policy, and is uncoordinated. We stand to lose ground without progressive and integrated planning and support for advanced computing, networking, data visualization and analytics, and data management. Canada is facing a data deluge — and with that comes an opportunity for both significant innovation and also potential disruption.

Collective investment and coordinated stewardship of a world-leading, integrated digital infrastructure (DI) ecosystem are needed now to secure Canada's continued success in the global economy. Our institutions, government and industry must come to terms with the growing and inextricable link between public interests and private sector needs. But we need to do better in aligning policies and initiatives across sectors and jurisdictions.

The Leadership Council for Digital Infrastructure (LCDI) is a voluntary collective of leaders that represents key stakeholders in the creation of a world-leading, advanced digital infrastructure ecosystem for Canada. Its vision and purpose is to ensure that Canada's DI evolves to benefit society by accelerating research, innovation and education. However, it can't do it alone.

Canada's advanced digital infrastructure ecosystem needs to be holistic and integrated across an array of services, policies and practices. It must deal with the facilities, services and capacities that provide the research community (academic, government and private sector) with the capability to conduct data-intensive, top-level research in their respective fields, and intensify collaborations nationally and internationally.

The research infrastructure includes single-site, distributed and nationally centralized e-infrastructure that is itself connected with comparable systems internationally. It includes highly skilled personnel and the resources to manage and preserve the national asset of data generated through publicly funded research.

Why is this important?

• Without massive computational resources to deal with big data, we will be unable to address complex problems such as global financial markets, climate change, genomics;

• In the absence of diverse elements of DI, Canadian researchers will not be in a position to contribute to forefront discoveries such as the recent identification of the Higgs boson — e.g., CANARIE to provide an optical link, funding agencies to support the infrastructure and highly skilled personnel to bring the pieces together;

• Without massive data and analysis capabilities, as well as long-term, secure storage of knowledge, we will not retain our leadership in health and personalized medicine — world leading initiatives such as CBRAIN (whose engine drives a web platform from which users world-wide remotely control and compute data) and Brain-CODE (whose informatics platform will support the collection and storage of data relevant to dealing with neurodegenerative disease);

• Currently, important data sets of value to Canadians at large are being lost forever because older data are not being digitized, or digital artifacts disappear through lack of long-term archival facilities. Computational approaches are opening new avenues of research in the humanities and the social sciences, leading to new digital artifacts in turn requiring curation and preservation.

While Canada has made major strides over the past decade to build upon some of the key pieces of this ecosystem, efforts have been fragmented and the growth uneven. The system as it currently exists is fundamentally broken and in need of repair.

A senior member of the academic community has described the Canadian digital infrastructure ecosystem as having fragmented approaches, overlapping jurisdictions, multiple voices, inconsistent funding, a focus on equipment rather than people, little attention to data as "infrastructure," and policy gaps. We have yet to hear serious challenges of this assessment.

How do we make progress?

• We intensify our commitment to multi-stakeholder coordination – what the LCDI has been doing, but going further;

• We advocate for an overarching policy framework;

• We develop a roadmap that has broad community buy-in and explores new partnerships and new ways of doing business;

• We cooperate with governments, educators and the private sector to strengthen DI for future prosperity and competitiveness, economically, socially, and scientifically.

The LCDI has developed a vision for Canada's DI that acknowledges the interdependence of all of its parts within a single ecosystem: from faster and more robust networking, to the provision of advanced computing capability, and a commitment to good stewardship of data — how it's created, archived, curated, shared and re-used. The vision also recognizes the importance of continuing to develop and nurture the talent of the highly qualified personnel required to drive the DI ecosystem in an increasingly data intensive world.

Action is urgent. We can no longer sit on the sidelines and debate the problems. Over 130 stakeholders are coming together January 28-29 at DI Summit 2014in Ottawa to identify critical priority actions, the timeline and who will have responsibility for what actions. This is a collective agenda. All must take their part in ensuring a robust, sustainable and enabling DI.

Dr Jay Black and Dr Steven Liss co-chair the Leadership Council for Digital Infrastructure (www.digitalleadership.ca). Dr Black is chief information officer at Simon Fraser Univ and Dr Liss is VP research at Queen's Univ.