ABSTRACT
Advancing technological and scientific innovation is a key component of national competitiveness strategies. The United States has a long and rich tradition in supporting scientific innovations via its National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and partnership with universities. The focus of this chapter is on NSF-funded programs to develop and operate a distributed large-scale research cyberinfrastructure to spur scientific innovations. The first program is the TeraGrid, initiated in 2003 and subsequently funded in 2005 for five years. The practical significance of a cyberinfrastructure for computational disciplines lies in the size and duration of investment, geographical scope, and salience in national competitiveness. The governance structure and mechanism are composed of the rules as articulated by Ostrom and her colleagues. The technical component of the framework is a major modification to the standard perspective of public management networks. Technical service capability is the last element of the technical infrastructure.
