We are excited to announce a new National Science Foundation award for “Cloud Conversations: AI-Augmented Interfaces to Research Infrastructure,” a collaborative project led by the Nimbus team at the University of Chicago. Cloud Conversations will build an AI-powered conversational interface that lets researchers describe what they need in plain language and have a suitable computing environment planned, provisioned, and validated for them across open research infrastructure — lowering the systems-expertise barrier that keeps many scientists from making full use of national testbeds and cloud platforms.
A central strength of the project is its partnership across three complementary platforms. The University of Chicago team (PI Kate Keahey, with co-PI Kexin Pei) leads the framework and grounds it in Chameleon. TACC (the Texas Advanced Computing Center, award #2609116, PI Niall Gaffney) and Jetstream2 at Indiana University (award #2609117, PI David Hancock) join as research-infrastructure partners, so that the natural-language interface is designed and validated against production platforms with very different architectures and user communities from the outset.
By targeting Chameleon, Jetstream2, and TACC together, Cloud Conversations aims to produce an interface that generalizes across the open research-infrastructure ecosystem rather than a single testbed. You can read more in the NSF award abstract for the lead award, #2609115. We look forward to sharing more as the project gets underway.