March 17, 2014

Research Computing on Campuses:

National Perspectives Panel

John Towns

PI and Project Director, XSEDE

Director, Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure Programs, NCSA

jtowns@ncsa.illinois.edu

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• Please cite as: Towns, John. 2014. Research Computing on Campuses: National Perspectives Panel Presentation. Advancing Research Computing on Campuses: Best Practices Workshop, Jan 16-17, 2015, Urbana, IL. http://www.slideshare.net/jtownsil/arcc-nationalperpectivepanel-xsede-towns

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Who is this guy? • John Towns

– PI and Project Director of XSEDE – Director, Collaborative eScience Program Office at NCSA – Co-Founder, Illinois Campus Cluster Program

• Background – just a mid-western boy from Missouri

• I don’t see a lot of folks from Missouri in the circles I am in

– failed physicist • general relativity

– failed computational scientist • numerical simulation of black hole spacetimes

– failed networked applications guy • NLANR-DAST: National Laboratory for Applied Network Research-

Distributed Applications Support Team

– budding social engineer

• Wearing my XSEDE hat for this discussion

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XSEDE – accelerating scientific discovery

• XSEDE’s Vision: a world of digitally enabled researchers, engineers, and scholars participating in multidisciplinary collaborations to tackle society’s grand challenges

• XSEDE’s Mission: to substantially enhance the productivity of a growing community of researchers, engineers, and scholars through access to advanced digital services that support open research; and to coordinate and add significant value to the leading cyberinfrastructure resources funded by the NSF and other agencies

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XSEDE’s Strategic Goals

• Deepen and extend the use of the advanced digital research services ecosystem – deepen use by existing researchers, engineers, and scholars – extend use to new communities – prepare the current and next generation via education, training, and

outreach – raise the general awareness of the value of advanced digital services

• Advance the advanced digital research services ecosystem – create an open and evolving e-infrastructure – enhance the array of technical expertise and support services offered

• Sustain the advanced digital research services ecosystem – assure and maintain a reliable and secure infrastructure – provide excellent user support services – operate an effective and innovative virtual organization

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What is XSEDE?

• An ecosystem of advanced digital services accelerating scientific discovery – support a growing portfolio of resources and services

• advanced computing, high-end visualization, data analysis, and other resources and services

• interoperability with other infrastructures

• A virtual organization providing – dynamic distributed infrastructure – support services, and technical expertise to enable

researchers engineers and scholars • addressing the most important and challenging problems facing

the nation and world

• A project funded by the National Science Foundation

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Discuss a particularly challenging/thorny issue… (campus cluster relevant)

Campus Bridging • How do we facilitate campus bridging?

– integrating campus researchers and resources into the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem

• Multi-pronged approach – Campus Champions

• local source of knowledge about HPC/HTC and other digital services, opportunities and resources

• empowers campus researchers, educators, and students to advance scientific discovery

– Campus Bridging • lower the barriers to utilization of XSEDE resources by researchers and

to disseminate the best practices of XSEDE resources to campus IT staff

– Service Providers (SP) Forum • a forum for open and inclusive discussion of topics of interest to the

SP community • a formal communication channel between the Forum members and

XSEDE

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Describe your top unsolved challenge…

Articulating the value of XSEDE to stakeholders

• Stakeholders – funding agency: NSF – community we support: researchers, scholars and engineers – our partners: Service Providers, other

infrastructure providers, collaborators in technology development,…

– administration at our respective institutions

– ourselves: XSEDE staff

• Requires clear metrics of success – How do you clearly and succinctly relate

science impact when you don’t do any science? – How do you clearly and succinctly relate societal impact to “Joe

Six-Pack?”

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Describe your top funding problem…

Sustainability of Funding

• XSEDE in year 3 of 5 year project

– Can we secure an additional 5 years of funding?

• How do we sustain after 10 years?

– Can we avoid disruptive nature of re-compete while still deriving best value?

– Will NSF even continue to fund such an activity?

• Is NSF definition of “sustainable” that they no longer fund it?

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How would you spend $1B (US/CAD) to dramatically improve our national CI?

Multiple Efforts! (some of what I would do…)

• Co-invest with campuses to develop campus CI: $200M – ??% match from campuses; must integrate with national CI – 2-3 rounds of awards running 3-5 years

• Establish a national data infrastructure: $250M – needs to compliment the national computing infrastructure – 2-3 rounds of awards running 3-5 years

• Workforce development: $40M – expand current and grow new programs to develop CI-savvy

• researchers: grad student, postdocs, research scientists, faculty, … • technical staff: systems admins, network engineers, applications support staff, …

– 2-3 rounds of awards running 3-5 years

• Develop new leadership in our community: $10M – establish programs to develop leadership

• center directors, facility mangers, large scale project leads do not have these

– 2-3 rounds of awards running 3-5 years

• Sustain this! $500M – investment fund to generate ongoing funds for sustaining/expanding these

efforts

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Questions?