Overview
XSEDE’s Education and Outreach team worked closely with the Training team to launch the broader array of TEOS programs and activities. The team collectively benefitted from the foundational efforts of TeraGrid and other pre-existing partnerships to get an early start on many activities, with a number of early successful accomplishments.
An informal meeting of TEOS partners and staff is planned for SC’11 to allow time for everyone to meet one another and compare plans and directions.
Education
Education activities for the first quarter can be divided into four major categories: 1) conducting workshops for faculty and students, 2) development of competencies for computational science programs, 3) initiating collaborations with universities interested in starting or expanding formal computational science degree and certificate programs, and 4) international collaboration with PRACE.
Faculty and Student Workshops
Workshop planning began before the official start of the project and carried out throughout the summer of 2011. A series of workshops for faculty interested in computational science education was organized by the Shodor Education Foundation and conducted in collaboration with SC11 and a number of participating institutions. A total of 326 people participated from 110 different institutions. Thirty of the institutions were from doctoral granting institutions, 11 liberal arts colleges, 22 baccalaureate institutions, 39 master’s institutions, 4 community colleges, and 4 other institutions. The workshops were week-long, intensive sessions focusing on the tools and pedagogy to teach computational science in various fields. The table in the appendix has a list of the workshops, attendance numbers, and host institutions for the workshops.
XSEDE also sponsored a parallel computing boot camp August 15-17 at the University of California Berkeley led by James Demmel, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. The three-day course included both local and remote, Internet audiences. There were 155 Internet participants and 111 onsite participants. A full list of the participating universities and research institutions is available upon request. The sessions were also recorded and available online for use asynchronously. The agenda and recordings can be accessed at http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/2011bootcampagenda.
XSEDE collaborated with the University of Michigan and on the Blue Waters Virtual School of Computational Science and Engineering (VSCSE) summer school on “Petascale Programming Environments and Tools” delivered synchronously to 78 registered attendees at 7 sites (Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, NCSA, Northwestern, Princeton University, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, University of Texas at El Paso, University of Utah) and across the country via high definition Audio/Video connections on July 12-15. The presentation materials and video recordings of the sessions are publicly available. XSEDE staff provided content for a number of sessions and access to computational resources for the summer school. The VSCSE activities are funded through a CI-TEAM award to the University of Michigan and NCSA.
SDSC Education and Outreach hosted 15 summer workshops for pre-college students from July-August 2011, with non-XSEDE sources of funding. Workshops were one week in length and took place at various locations at SDSC, across campus and at an offsite location. Over 250 students were served by these workshops, which covered topics such as biology, geology, the scientific method, visualization, virtual worlds and programming.
Competencies
As part of the effort to encourage the formal adoption of computational science degree and certificate programs, additional work was undertaken to derive a set of competencies for undergraduate and graduate level computational science that can be the foundation for such programs. The undergraduate competencies originally developed in Ohio for the Ralph Regula School of Computational Science have been put forward for further review. Initial reviews were completed by the faculty at the institutions the XSEDE program is initially aiding to enhance their programs (see below). Several of those institutions have already used those competencies as the basis for creating new courses. Further review will be conducted over the next two months with the goal of publishing an updated set of competencies by the end of 2011.
A revised set of graduate level competencies was presented at the TeraGrid’11 meeting in Salt Lake City. Comments were received from the conference participants and will be incorporated into the next draft of the competencies. Those competencies will be reviewed via series of webinars over the next several months with the goal of publishing a revised set by February 1, 2012. The competencies will guide development of model programs in computational science. Both sets of competencies can be found at http://www.rrscs.org/competencies.
Computational Science Degree and Certificate Programs
During the first quarter, we also began our efforts to promote the adoption of formal computational science programs at collaborating universities. A flyer on the nature of the effort was prepared and distributed to the education and outreach teams to assist in recruiting additional interest in the program. We have also worked with four institutions that volunteered early on to work on new and expanded programs at their institutions. The initial institutions are Kean University, Richard Stockton College, North Carolina State University, and University of Arkansas. The principle sponsor at the University of Arkansas has moved to Clemson University and is now considering program additions there. We are also continuing discussions with the faculty at the University of Arkansas.
During the first quarter we have held conference calls aimed at defining the current courses and expertise on each campus, their program goals, and an initial set of strategies for working with each to meet those goals. In addition, the participants have agreed to participate further in the review of the computational science competencies and to assist in creating model programs that could be adopted at their institutions. We expect to follow-up with these institutions with campus visits, workshops for their faculty and administrators, and other activities that will help them to move their program ideas into reality.
We have also been contacted by a faculty member at Merrimac College interested in starting an undergraduate minor program at that institution. We have completed initial discussions and will be assisting them in formulating a new, proposed program at that institution. Some initial interest in computational science programs has been identified by SURA at minority serving institutions. We expect to work with these institutions and make additional contacts with interested institutions over the next quarter to widen the reach of the XSEDE education program.
International Collaboration
XSEDE and PRACE collaborated to host the second annual EU-US Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences was conducted August 7-12, 2011 at Lake Tahoe, California. In attendance were graduate students and postdocs from Europe and the United States, along with instructors and support staff from Europe and the United States. The participants were from 17 different countries and 30% of the participants were women. A total of 60 participants were chosen from among 236 applications, a 25% acceptance rate. There were 26 instructors and support staff from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to provide a broad spectrum of HPC content as well as mentoring for the students.
The goal was to expand the knowledge of the attendees about high performance computing (HPC) and it applications in multiple fields of science and engineering. The goal was also to foster new collegial friendships and partnerships (nationally and internationally) among the presenters and attendees.
Through a survey after the event was completed, over 90% of the attendees, and 100% of the presenters and support staff, indicated that they found the summer school to be excellent or very good, representing a 5% improvement for the attendees from the 2010 summer school. Through the surveys, the respondents provided a number of suggestions for further improving the summer school in future years, along with a very strong vote for continuing to offer similar summer schools in the future.
The summer school was funded by a supplement from NSF/OCI.
Outreach
The first quarter of XSEDE Outreach has been dedicated to beginning the programs that were defined in the original proposal, as well as working to integrate the new partners and programs that were added. All “major milestones” are on schedule. Internal milestones are fluctuating as processes for events and activities are developing.
A number of TEOS people are involved in planning for the SC11 Conference. Included are Scott Lathrop as General Chair, Jim Ferguson on the Infrastructure Committee, Laura McGinnis and Steve Gordon on the Communities Committee, and Kay Hunt on the Executive Committee. A number of other TEOS committee members are involved in contributing to SC11 activities providing content, supporting XSEDE booth activities, supporting the XSEDE Scholars Program, contributing to the Education and Broader Engagement Programs, and conducting BOFs.
Student Engagement
TeraGrid Supplement for Summer Student Programs
NSF provided a supplement for the third year in a row, to provide airfare, hotel, and conference registration for students to attend the annual TeraGrid’11 conference. There were three aspects to the TeraGrid’11 Student Program, the Student Poster Contest, Student Volunteers, and the Open Science Grid summer school.
High School - Skanda Koppula (North Allegheny Senior High School, Pittsburgh, PA), "The Remote Acquisition and Distribution of Oceanographic Data"
Undergraduate - Brandon Cloutier and Paul Rigge (University of Michigan), "Numerical Investigations of Convection"
Graduate - Christopher MacDermaid and Christopher Von Bargen (University of Pennsylvania), "Computational Modeling and Design of Protein and Polymeric Assemblies"
Four other students were acknowledged as “TeraGrid Emerging Scientists” for their work presented as part of the full (non-Student Program) content of the conference:
Technical Track Paper - Qingyu Meng (University of Utah), "Using Hybrid Parallelism to Improve Memory Use in the Uintah Framework"
Visualization Gallery - Andrew Pfeifer (Carnegie Mellon University), "A Computational Model of Dynamic Social Entropy"
Research Poster - Yanli Zhao (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), "GPGPU-based Parallel Viewshed Analysis on CyberGIS Gateway"
Student Technical Paper - Anthony Frachioni (Binghampton University), "Anderson Localization of Phonons in Thermoelectric Nanostructures: A Path to Efficient Thermoelectric Energy Generation"
Comments from Students
“I'm so excited to publish a paper in TG'11 science track. TG'11 student program provides an excellent opportunity to discuss the state of art science and technology with experts in HPC areas, and share experience with students from different universities and different majors. This will definitely influence my future career choice in HPC world.”
He Huang, University of Wyoming“TeraGrid 11 was the first scientific conference I have attended, and I would not have had this opportunity without the Student Program, which provided my airfare and lodging. Attending the conference gave me the chance to see the real-world impact of my research, and made me more confident in my abilities to pursue a career in science.”
Robin Betz, University of California at San Diego“I have very minimal programming experience so this was an incredible opportunity for me to learn about HPC and how I can actually use TeraGrid resources in my current research.”
Ahlmahz Negash, University of WashingtonStudent Engagement Program
XSEDE has developed a student engagement program to provide internships for undergraduate and graduate students. The first step is to recruit projects for the students to work on from the current XSEDE research and support community. A call for projects has been developed and began circulating at the National Society for Black Physicists and the National Society for Hispanic Physicists, September 21-24 in Austin, Texas. Additional dissemination and recruiting are planned for the upcoming quarter.
Also, see information about the Clemson EPSCoR Outreach in the Campus Champions and the XSEDE Scholars Program in the Underrepresented Engagement sections below.
Campus Champions
An updated Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been developed to reflect the changes in transitioning from TeraGrid to XSEDE. All previous TeraGrid Campus Champions are being asked to sign the new MOU, and all new Champions are using the new MOU as they join the program.
The Campus Champions program has grown to 102 members. Nine new campuses joined in the first quarter of XSEDE. New campuses are: University of Iowa, University of Minnesota, University of Florida, Arizona State University, University of Utah, Louisiana State University, University of Colorado, University of Chicago, and University of Nebraska.
The Campus Champions had a very visible presence at the TeraGrid’11 Conference. Prior to the opening of the conference, the Champions gathered for a day of community-building, feedback, and an introduction to XSEDE. The Champions Program also hosted a BoF session and delivered a paper as part of the conference program.
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Scott Lathrop represented XSEDE and the Campus Champions program at the NGS All Hands Meeting in the UK. The NGS is developing a similar program for campuses across the UK and are very interested in the XSEDE Campus Champion program as a model.
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A Campus Champions BOF has been accepted a part of the Technical Program for SC11.
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XSEDE Campus Champions Fellows MOU and application are in progress. A project description draft is being reviewed by Campus Champions and XSEDE Leadership. It is expected that a call for applications for XSEDE Campus Champions Fellows will be announced during SC11.
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XSEDE has been working with Jim Bottum and Barr von Oehsen of Clemson University to assist with a proposal to the NSF EPSCoR program to support engaging undergraduate students and Champions in a year-long program to immerse them in computational science and engineering and high performance computing. Clemson recently received an award, but due to the lateness of the award they will delay the initiation of the program until the SC12 conference.
Underrepresented Engagement
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SURA served on the conference committee to help host the Joint Conference for the National Society for Black Physicists and the National Society for Hispanic Physicists. SURA, NICS, PSC and TACC staffed the first-ever XSEDE conference booth space and received requests for more information from 60 conference attendees. Contact information is being forwarded to the appropriate XSEDE services for followup.
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SURA is working with Mark Jack (FAMU) to assist him with submitting an XRAC proposal for the upcoming allocations cycle.
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Rice University announced the XSEDE Scholars Program and received 409 applications. A total of 40 students (28 undergraduate, 12 graduate) from 30 colleges and universities have been selected to participate in a year-long program of engagement in computational science and engineering. The first hour-long online session that the Scholars will participate in is a webinar featuring a Microsoft researcher on November 3, 2011. The group will also meet in person at the SC'11 conference in Seattle over three days (November 12-November 14) in order to be introduced to the XSEDE research community and organization and build community among the Scholars. At the faculty level, Rice University is currently in the process of recruiting faculty members to mentor and provide leadership for students in the XSEDE Scholars Program (XSP).
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At the SC11 conference the XSEDE Scholars Program (XSP) leaders plan to invite faculty and professionals participating in the Broadening Engagement program to join the XSEDE Faculty Council.
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SURA collaborated with the SC’11 Broader Engagement Program Committee to identify candidates for SURA-XSEDE Broadening Engagement Fellows, receiving travel support to SC11 and mentoring. The recipients are: Luis Cueva-Parra, Auburn University; Eric Crumpler, Valencia College; Glendora Carter, Jarvis Christian College; Miaoqing Huang, University of Arkansas; Edmund Moses Ndip, Hampton; and Eduardo Socolovsky, Norfolk State University.
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SURA visited Howard University and met with their Campus Champion, Marcus Alfred. In Steve Grevious the new Assistant Provost & CIO Academic Affairs at Howard University visited SURA offices to learn more about XSEDE. SURA visited Morgan State University, which generated 10 applications to the XSEDE scholars program and interest in the XSEDE Student engagement program.
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SDSC represented XSEDE with a presentation and campus champion recruitment at CI Days at Salish Kootenai College in Montana on August 2, 2011. Follow-up to that presentation served to identify a new Campus Champion for the region, which includes University of Montana at Missoula, to replace the TeraGrid campus champion who is leaving UM for another position. Following the XSEDE presentation, a potential new XSEDE user from Salish Kootenai College (Dr. Frank Stomp, computational mathematics) expressed interest in testing the Gordon architecture with his algorithms. He was provided contact information for Bob Sinkovits, applications lead for Steve Gordon, to determine if that new XSEDE resource's architecture would be a good fit for his research problems. Dr. Stomp intended to contact Bob Sinkovits when he returned from a three-week trip to South America. Additional follow-up with him is scheduled for next quarter.
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SDSC Outreach's Baxter met with Kevin Franklin on 9/9/2011 to discuss possible Humanities applications that might take advantage of XSEDE resources. Several potential projects were identified, and discussions are continuing at this time regarding next steps for collaborative proposals with Humanities researchers.
Speakers Bureau
Tutorial: “XSEDE Client Installation and Use -‐ From the Global Federated File System to Running Jobs”
Tutorial: “XSEDE/Genesis II Installation, Configuration, and Management”
Paper: “The XSEDE Architecture -‐-‐ A Renewed Emphasis on Quality Attributes”
Plenary: “XSEDE Town Hall”
BoF: “Hierarchical Data Storage Strategy in XSEDE”
BoF: “XSEDE TEOS Plans for Community Engagement”
BoF: “Carry It Forward: From TeraGrid to XSEDE”
BoF: “XSEDE Advanced User Support and Campus Champion Fellows program information”
BoF: “Globus GRAM 5: Requirements and Use Cases for XSEDE”
BoF: “XSEDE TEOS Plans for Student Engagement”
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Joint Conference for the National Society of Black Physicists and National Society of Hispanic Physicists – See Underrepresented Engagement, above.
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CASC Fall Meeting – John Towns introduced XSEDE to the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing.
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SURA provided a briefing on XSEDE to the SURAgrid membership.
Issues, Concerns, Challenges
We are waiting on information on the relationship with Open Science Grid so that Kim Dillman’s role (job description) in supporting OSG within the Campus Champions can be finalized.
Community Input
The community input lead will work with the TEOS team and the external evaluators to develop a survey of needs as follow-up to the initial survey conducted prior to funding of this project on an annual basis to ensure that the goals and objectives set forth in the proposal with feedback from the TEOS user community are being addressed and met. Planning is underway to launch this in coordination with other XSEDE surveys to avoid pinging the community too often.
Lead External Evaluator, Lizanne DeStefano and XSEDE community input lead, Edee Wiziecki attended the TeraGrid’11 Conference in July 2011 and met with leads from Outreach, Education, Campus Champions, and Training to discuss goals and objectives for the collection of longitudinal impact data. These discussions helped evaluators navigate the complex TEOS program and to begin preparing IRB documents and an evaluation plan.
To date, evaluators have made contact with all TEOS level 3 managers and the lead of Campus Champions to provide formative information for program development. Evaluators have participated in several Campus Champions conference calls, met with Campus Bridging and Infrastructure leads at NCSA in September, and communicated via email to key informants of TEOS program development and management. Evaluators will attend SC’11 to further guide program improvement. Special attention will be paid to the developing XSEDE Scholars Program, which will kick off at the SC’11 conference.
Evaluators are seeking Internal Review Board (IRB) approval for the evaluation. An initial application for educational exemption was submitted on September 7, 2011. Evaluators are currently in the pre-review process with the University of Illinois (UIUC) IRB. As agreed upon, the external evaluation will only cover TEOS activities and will be conducted by Lizanne DeStefano and Lorna Rivera through I-STEM at UIUC. We are currently awaiting their decision and approval.
An evaluation matrix has been developed and disseminated for review by TEOS leads on September 23, 2011. The matrix was generated to outline the 10 primary TEOS services defined in the proposal, revision documents, and information from TEOS leads. These services are broken down to describe the individual goals/outcomes, activities, evaluation methods, and timelines of each service to guide the overall evaluation. The matrix is a working document. It is understood that adjustments will regularly be made based on programmatic changes and ongoing evaluation results. Evaluators will finalize the first draft of the matrix following the matrix review deadline of September 30, 2011. To minimize the potential of creating spam for XSEDE users, evaluators will coordinate their survey efforts with the User Engagement team lead by Glenn Brook.
Infrastructure
First quarter issues for Education and Outreach Infrastructure included the interaction with the XSEDE public web site team, the XSEDE Portal team, and the project Wiki team. Staff from the TeraGrid project, used to a certain level of access to public project web areas, were initially stymied with a more restrictive XSEDE access policy on the public pages. As XSEDE brought on a new web master at TACC, the restrictive policies toward editing the main web site were lessened. At the end of September, a meeting between the interested parties in E&O and External Relations resulted in an agreement to allow a limited number of staff to make modifications to the public web site. This is important for the promotion and featuring of E&O activities that change constantly throughout the year.
We are still working through issues with moving information on Campus Champions web pages from the old TeraGrid web space and a path forward has been identified.
Identification of the information that the E&O curator (Ange Mason, SDSC) will collect is ongoing and we expect to be constantly under review. Some of this data will come from outside of E&O, and we are working on the best avenues for collection of items including conference presentations by XSEDE staff, including PIs and senior staff.
September brought the beginning of the XSEDE TEOS blog, covering educational outreach and events across the national partnership. The blog consists of the XSEDE Monthly Blog Spot, which showcases upcoming conferences, partner research, staff recognition, educator opportunities, student engagement and training events. There is also a weekly XSEDE newsroom column reporting outreach news from the previous week. An "In the News" section focuses on staff recognition or changes within XSEDE. Training events are also posted as they are provided to me. There have been 17 posts to the blog.
Campus Bridging
Background
The campus bridging group has been defined and organized with Craig Stewart (IU), as level 3 manager, Jim Ferguson (NICS) as lead staff, and with Therese Miller (IU) and Rich Knepper (IU) also involved.
‘Campus Bridging’ is a relatively new concept in distributed scientific computing. The term was coined by Ed Seidel when he charged the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Campus Bridging Task Force at the beginning of 2009. This Task Force was one of six ACCI Task Forces (see http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/taskforces/) but it was the only task force that introduced a new concept in NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure. Craig Stewart chaired this committee, and many people now involved in XSEDE and OSG participated in this task force and workshops held on topics related to campus bridging. Literally hundreds of pages of reports, position papers, and presentations related to campus bridging are available online (http://pti.iu.edu/campusbridging). The ACCI Campus Bridging Task Force created to following definition:
Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist’s campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the ‘virtual’ aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO.
We have arrived at a basic definition of the goals and scope of the XSEDE campus bridging effort, drawing heavily on the work of the ACCI Campus Bridging Task Force:
The goal of the XSEDE Campus Bridging effort is to facilitate ease of access by researchers using their local computing resources and the resources offered by XSEDE - to allow any researcher to use local cyberinfrastructure and XSEDE as though they were peripherals to their laptop.
Campus Bridging is more than a single project—it’s a way of thinking about access to digital resources. XSEDE Campus Bridging leads Craig Stewart and Jim Ferguson will work to keep the entire XSEDE team thinking about this philosophy: Moving between local and national resources should not be an insurmountable challenge for researchers but instead should be a smooth path to increased productivity.
It is also expected that this infrastructure will enhance communication among researchers on different campuses. Campus Bridging is focused on working with campuses to assist them in adopting and making effective use of the XSEDE system architecture. XSEDE personnel will consult with campus personnel to provide awareness, advice, training, and assistance with the installation of appropriate XSEDE architecture components to support their local research community.
Campus Bridging will work with campuses in a variety of ways - working through campus champions when appropriate, but also working directly with CIOs, VPs for research, and researchers on campuses that do not have campus champions.
One of the initial challenges for Campus Bridging was to establish effective modes of interaction with other relevant groups within XSEDE. This has now largely been done, as described below:
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Architecture and Design. Campus Bridging. Campus Bridging interacts closely with the Architecture team, tracking new ideas and plans from the Architecture team and relaying them as appropriate to campus-based stakeholders, leveraging particularly the Campus Champions.
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Systems and Software Engineering. Campus Bridging forms a conduit of information and feedback from the community to the Systems and Software Engineering group, particularly by submitting requirements to the DOORS database.
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Software Development and Integration and Software Testing & Deployment. Campus Bridging is directly engaged with both SD&I and ST&D as regards testing and deployment of software deployed on campuses and used in a ‘campus bridging’ context.
The campus bridging concept is new and has very much caught the attention of the larger science community in the US. Indeed, one of the most critical risks facing the XSEDE campus bridging effort is keeping expectations on the part of the community to a level we can effectively meet. A flier about Campus Bridging has been developed for distribution at SC11. Information about campus bridging is now posted online as part of the XSEDE web presence (https://www.xsede.org/web/guest/campus-bridging) and via a user forum accessible within the XSEDE portal. A Campus Bridging category has been established in the XSEDE User Portal User Forums (https://portal.xsede.org/forums). In addition, representatives of the Campus Bridging team have given talks introducing the campus bridging topic within the US and internationally.
The Campus Bridging group is hewing closely to all of the recommendations in the ACCI Campus Bridging Final Report. Operationally, we are paying particular attention to the following recommendation:
Strategic Recommendation to the NSF #6: The NSF should fund activities that support the evolution and maturation of cyberinfrastructure through careful analyses of needs (in advance of creating new cyberinfrastructure facilities) and outcomes (during and after the use of cyberinfrastructure facilities). The NSF should establish and fund processes for collecting disciplinary community requirements and planning long-term cyberinfrastructure software roadmaps to support disciplinary community research objectives. The NSF should likewise fund studies of cyberinfrastructure experiences to identify attributes leading to impact, and recommend a set of metrics for the development, deployment, and operation of cyberinfrastructure, including a set of guidelines for how the community should judge cyberinfrastructure technologies in terms of their technology readiness. All NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure implementations should include analysis of effectiveness including formal user surveys. All studies of cyberinfrastructure needs and outcomes, including ongoing studies of existing cyberinfrastructure facilities, should be published in the open, refereed, scholarly literature.
As such, copies of presentations given by the XSEDE campus bridging group, and formal reports of campus bridging activities, are being published online via the IU Scholarworks digital repository (https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/12993) in reusable formats, under a creative commons 3.0 attribution license. An informal Birds of a Feather session has been scheduled for SC11, to explain further the role of campus bridging within XSEDE, to discuss the Global Federated File Systems (GFFS) pilot project [see section 8.l.3], and gather feedback from the community about their needs and requests regarding XSEDE and campus bridging.
TeraGrid’11 BOF
Campus Bridging held a BOF at the TeraGrid’11 meeting together with the Campus Champions in order to discuss Campus Bridging and the Campus Champions with some of the XSEDE architecture group and other group members. This activity gathered a number of useful comments from the campus community. Interest focused on the means for Campus Champions and other interested campus participants to receive information about the architecture group's plans and directions and the appropriate channel for sending in questions and needs to the architecture group. Both Campus Bridging to DOORs and direct to DOORs was offered as vectors for providing information.
Campus participants noted a need for documentation about best practices for setting up local campus CI, interest in installers and software packages, and information about the decisions made behind setting up XSEDE CI, that could be reflected in local installations. Some discussion of the Common User Environment work as well as the work of the Open Science Grid noted successes in that area as well as sticky points for getting local CI to work well with national-level CI. Additionally, great interest was shown in documentation and training for users that would be applicable for national-level as well as local CI.
8.1.1 Global Federated File Systems (GFFS) Pilot Project
Campus Bridging has developed a call for proposals for campuses to participate in a pilot project installing and using the Global Federated File Systems (GFFS). Campus Bridging has gotten agreement from all relevant stakeholders within XSEDE to release this CFP, which will happen in October.
XSEDE team will select 2-3 campuses (or large research groups) that have significant experience with the TeraGrid in the past, and 1-2 campuses (or large research groups) that have potential users but not much past experience with the TeraGrid, and will provide onsite help and training in use of these tools. Proposals should be no longer than three pages, including at least one paragraph each on the intellectual merit and broader impacts of the proposal—similar to NSF proposal requirements. In addition, each proposal should include a facilities statement for their campus detailing the size and scope of your computing resources, and NSF-style bios for at least two people who will be the responsible parties on campus. Deadline for proposals is November 30 2011, with notifications expected to be made by December 2011. An informal BOF about campus bridging and this CFP will be held at SC’11 3-5pm on Tuesday November 15 in WSCC 3A/B.
In choosing proposals to accept we will give the strongest consideration to campuses that have:
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active TeraGrid/XSEDE Campus Champions
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strategic plan in place that includes research computing
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significant level of a shared computing resource, which might eventually be shared in a closer engagement with XSEDE in the future.
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need for sharing data across campuses and preferably some idea of the overall campus requirements for data movement from and to XSEDE resources.
What XSEDE campus bridging will offer to the campuses, accepted as early adopters, is consulting and assistance on XSEDE and related middleware and architecture (there is no financial component to this call for proposals). XSEDE will provide training and assistance, and will ask for feedback - good and bad -on XSEDE architecture deployed at campuses in return. Campus IT staff and researchers on the selected campuses will be exposed to the latest XSEDE-recommended infrastructure, and will play a vital part in shaping future updates and deployments of that infrastructure.
