The Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE/SC)'s national laboratories will evolve greatly over the next 10-30 years, including in the science performed, scientific methodologies employed, facilities operated, and users supported. To inform its future planning, DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) is hosting an exploratory Community of Interest Workshop (on Future Scientific Methodologies), to be held online, to examine how this evolution will shape, and be shaped by, the computational fabric: the data, storage, computing, and network infrastructure, and the methods and software that scientists and engineers use to leverage that infrastructure. This workshop provides participants with a unique opportunity to envision and influence these changes, via a 'curated unconference' format in which small group discussions are used to develop a shared vision. The unconference will be held on three non-consecutive days, November 2, November 5, and November 10, 2020. The workshop will take place for six hours during each day and include facilitated discussions. In order to use the in-workshop time most effectively, participants are expected to complete preparatory reading and exercises.
An earlier call for brief white papers lead to 131 community submissions from 241 unique authors. Topics from these white papers are being coalesced into discussion topics for the workshop. To facilitate thinking, it is assumed that current research in areas such as AI assistants, automated and autonomous experimental facilities, and terabit networks will succeed, fundamentally changing the relationship of how humans and machines generate, use, and interact with data and information, and that these developments will have wide reaching consequences for science methodologies. Areas for discussion may include future visions for advanced computational technologies, new mechanisms for accelerated data sharing and processing, new missions for the DOE laboratories, the interplay of storage and networking, and the impact on the lab workforce.