CI Facilitation Playbook

The CI Facilitation Playbook is a structured guide for connecting researchers, instructors, and students with appropriate cyberinfrastructure resources based on their needs. It walks facilitation teams through a repeatable process—from intake and assessment, to matching workloads with local, regional, and national resources, to documenting routing decisions and gathering feedback over time.

Institutions can adopt the playbook as a standard operating procedure for research computing engagement, ensuring that requests are handled consistently, opportunities are not missed, and staff have clear prompts for which questions to ask and which pathways to consider. The playbook supports collaboration across IT, research computing, and academic departments by making the decision logic explicit and easy to share.

Use the Research Computing/Cyberinfrastructure Intake Form and an initial meeting to gather a concise profile of the requester: domain, preferred tools, data size, compute needs, workflow style, and collaboration context. During the intake meeting with the requester, it is recommended to document your findings, which can be done using the Internal CI Facilitation Routing Form. This information should be enough for facilitators to quickly determine whether local, regional, or national CI options are appropriate and which examples or training materials to recommend.

Next, check whether the workload fits local systems in terms of software, storage, memory, walltime, and queue policies. If it does, route to campus resources and share onboarding, policies, and training opportunities; if not, consider regional partners, providing their contact information and user documentation. When neither local nor regional options are suitable, note that the request should move to national resources in Step 3.

When local and regional options are limited or a project clearly needs broader CI, use this step to match the workload with national services such as ACCESS-CI, NAIRR, NRP, or the OSG Open Science Pool. Briefly explain which pathway fits (HPC/HTC/cloud/gateway), point to the relevant documentation, policies, and onboarding pages, and capture what was recommended so the researcher knows the next concrete steps.

Record each facilitation outcome using the routing form so decisions are transparent and reproducible. Note whether the researcher was directed to local, regional, or national systems; which specific resource or contact was used; when onboarding was completed; and what follow-up actions are planned.

After the researcher has used the recommended resource, collect quick feedback on usability and fit, and log any lessons learned. Periodically review these notes to refine routing patterns, improve documentation and training, and update the playbook so it reflects current practice and resource availability.