Program Overview
Collaboratories employ information and communication systems to remove barriers of geographic distance and time from research collaborations, not just scientists and engineers working remotely, but working together regardless of their location. Major emphases of collaboratories include natural work processes and in-depth, collaborative work. One does not deploy a collaboratory, one builds a collaboratory with scientists, information, and tools. Other terms that are used almost interchangeably with collaboratory are "virtual laboratory," "laboratory without walls," and "collaboratorium." Collaboratories have roles in all stages of the scientific process, from the initial planning, to the design of the experiments and development of software, to the execution of those experiments and simulations and their analysis, to the preparation and dissemination of the results. The opportunity to explore heretofore intractable research questions, to provide timely solutions to a problem, and to employ expertise, data, experiments or computations that would not otherwise be available all provide competitive advantages to collaboratory use. Of course, collaboratories also provide opportunities to manage costs, by optimizing travel, equipment use and information value. Drivers like these make collaboratories essential for the complex research missions of the U.S. Department of Energy, and provide unprecedented opportunities for integration of DOE programs. The DOE National Collaboratories Research Program couples a coordinated set of infrastructure and middleware projects with a set of real world pilot projects. Technology development addresses both outstanding needs in architectures, frameworks, tools and processes needed to implement scientific collaboratories, and the key research issues that will enable breakthrough capabilities of the future. Because of their unique capabilities, collaboratories are frequently leading edge examples of knitting together new distributed systems technologies. DOE's collaboratory pilots integrate capabilities from the infrastructure and middleware efforts with capabilities from leading edge scientific applications develpment and other sources, and extend them to support collaboration in key DOE research programs. These projects provide real value to DOE researchers, while collecting invaluable information about the technological and sociological issues which still need to be addressed. Pilot projects also serve as a proof-of-principle of the value of collaboratories to the broad DOE community, and to the broader scientific community. The impact promises to be great, not only on what science we do, but also to how we accomplish our scientific endeavors. |
