Supporting Campus Research Through Facilitation: The ACI-REF Project Internet2 Global Summit – Washington, D.C. Executive Track Jim Bottum

Principal Investigator – ACI-REF Project

CIO & Vice Provost – Clemson University

Presidential Fellow – Internet2

Background and Context •  NSF Evolution (HPC as Initial Driver)

•  Campuses Growing in Parallel •  MRIs, CRIs, start-up packages •  Condo and co-lo approaches

•  Other factors •  Security, power and cooling, big data •  Above-the-desktop computing needs growing at an accelerated

pace •  Training and education gap between resources and

researchers – high barrier to entry without human assistance •  …and the barriers become higher as we bring in new

communities

Centers PACI TeraGrid XSEDE Reports Reports on Reports

NSF-Funded Project – ACI REF

PI: Jim Bottum, Clemson Project Leadership: •  James Cuff, Harvard (PI

Chair) •  Maureen Dougherty, USC •  Gwen Jacobs, Hawaii •  Paul Wilson, Wisconsin •  Tom Cheatham, Utah Facilitator Lead: Bob Freeman, Harvard Chief Scientist: Miron Livny, Wisconsin

$5.3M NSF Award supports the project leadership team and 2 Facilitators for each of the 6 partner sites for 2 years.

A Novel Approach Goal: Advance our nation's research & scholarly achievements through the transformation of campus computational capabilities and enhanced coupling to the national infrastructure. •  2 Research & Education “Facilitators” (REFs) Per Site •  Domain-area experts with knowledge of ACI resources and

capabilities

•  Substantial outreach activities by REFs – to all disciplines and departments on campus

ACI Resources Researchers

ACI-REF Project Facilitators

A Model – Campus Level User Growth •  May 2010 – first Clemson “facilitator” funded

•  2008: 19/52 Departments Trained on HPC

•  2014: 46/52 Departments Trained on HPC

May 2010: NSF Research Infrastructure Improvement Grant Funded

2015: ACI-REF Hire Preparing To Serve GIS Communities

Facilitators & Expertise Clemson University

•  Dr. Barr von Oehsen – Ph.D Mathematics •  Dr. Marcin Ziolkowski – Ph.D Quantum Chemistry •  Patricia Carbajales-Dale – Masters Geographic Information Systems •  Dr. Edward Duffy – Ph.D Computer Science •  Chris Konger – Masters Electrical Engineering (CI-Engineer)

Harvard University •  Dr. Aaron Kitzmiller – Ph.D Neurobiology •  Dr. Bob Freeman – Ph.D Virology (Facilitator Lead)

University of Wisconsin-Madison •  Lauren Michael – Masters Biophysics •  Christina Koch – Masters Mathematics

University of Utah •  Dr. Wim Cardoen – Ph.D Physical Chemistry •  Dr. Anita Orendt – Ph.D Physical Chemistry •  Dr. Martin Cuma – Ph.D Physical Chemistry •  Sean Igo – Masters Computer Science

University of Southern California •  Avalon Johnson, Electrical Engineering

University of Hawaii •  Dr. Ron Merrill – Ph.D Chemistry •  Dr. Sean Cleveland – Ph.D Microbiology

Progress

•  1st annual report submitted – March 2015 •  Successes include

•  Growth in number of users, disciplines, departments served on participating campuses

•  Breadth of support increased through expertise sharing •  Development of replicable best practices

•  Training, office hours, cross-institutional knowledge base

•  “Love letters” from faculty and researchers •  Facilitators have come together and are functioning as a

group •  I read the summaries of their regular meetings just like I

read those of the groups I’m responsible for at Clemson

Progress Example: Feltus Genomics Project

UH

UA = ACI-REF School

= Tripal Genome DB

= GENI Rack

= AL2S

The Feltus lab @Clemson is interested in optimizing genomics data transfer between Tripal+ genome database sites with Internet2/GENI and SDN. Utah now duplicating.

27.8X Faster Transfer from NCBI to Clemson Cluster! The significance of the speed up (which is looking more like 75-100X by the way) is that I can... A) SCALE UP EXPERIMENTS by using more input data since I can get the data quickly. B) MINIMIZE LOCAL STORAGE of huge files because they enter workflows and then get deleted. I can just download them again if I screwed up my experiment. -Alex Feltus, Associate Professor – Genomics (Clemson University)

OSG Regionals (e.g. GPN)

XSEDE Internet2

CASC ESnet

Status & Future Directions

•  Bi-Directional •  Renewal Proposal – in preparation

•  Fine tuning, additional runway, and some expansion of partners

•  ACI-REF Consortium •  Mechanism for adding partners committed to a community that: •  Values facilitation as a critical need to support research

•  Focuses on people helping people

•  Values collaboration – sharing of expertise across campuses

•  Sustainability – creation & adoption of a new career path for facilitators

•  Effort couples with existing campus & national investments so as to maximize impact on existing and planned resources

A New Profession?

The Problem

• Facilitators are not part of a recognized profession • Do not generally appear in university HR

structures or job family systems • Research computing is often supported by

departments or at least outside of the mainstream IT organization • Facilitators become migratory in nature –

follow the funding • Result is that facilitators are not always doing

work that draws on the best of their abilities

From the Atkins Report*

“A new interdisciplinary work force – The need for a new workforce – a new flavor of mixed science and technology

professional – is emerging. These individuals have expertise in a particular domain science area, as well as considerable

expertise in computer science and mathematics. Also needed in this interdisciplinary mix are professionals who are trained to understand and address the human factors dimensions of working across disciplines, cultures, and institutions using

technology-mediated collaboration tools.”

* Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, January 2003

The Project •  Working Title: Cyberpractitioner Project •  Principals: Steve Wolff and Jim Bottum •  Commissioned by Dave Lambert

•  Planning Grant – Final Proposal est. May 2015 •  Purpose: To explore the formalization of the cyberpractitioner

profession and engage the community at large in developing workforce development, training, and outreach programs.

•  Talks, BoFs, Panels •  TERENA – TNC15 •  CASC •  ISC15 •  SC15

•  In formative stages – assistance and thoughts are welcome.

Year 1 Successes Complex Economic Modeling – Nicolas Roys, Jesse Gregory, and Amit Gandhi, University of Wisconsin-Madison A number of researchers in the Department of Economics at UW-Madison have benefited from the assistance of ACI-REFs in designing high-throughput computational methods for solving complex economic models that are otherwise avoided by economists all over the world for their dependence on vast amount of computational time. As a result of consulting with ACI-REFs to optimize the computational approach, campus economists -- including Nicolas Roys, Jesse Gregory, Amit Gandhi, and students they advise -- can achieve up to decades of computing in a single day by simultaneously leveraging campus compute capacity and that of the Open Science Grid. Example: http://www.opensciencegrid.org/using-high-throughput-computing-to-evaluate-post-katrina-rebuilding-grants/

Year 1 Successes High-Energy Theoretical Physics – Chris Kelso, University of Utah

“I work in high energy theoretical particle physics. Specifically, I investigate physics beyond the Standard Model with a focus on dark matter implications. My research often requires scans of models that have very large numbers of parameters. This work could not be completed without the computing resources provided at CHPC. Almost as valuable as the use of the CHPC machines was the extremely helpful assistance I received from Wim R. Cardoen. Many of the codes I often use are serial, open source code that has been developed by many physics experts. To try and convert these codes to parallel would be a monumental task. Wim worked very hard to help me to find a solution that allowed this serial code to still utilize the numerous processors available on the CHPC machines. Without this, my projects would take months to finish, rather than a few days.”

– Chris Kelso, University of Utah PostDoc, on Utah ACI-REF Wim Cardoen

Year 1 Successes HPC Assistance in Biology Software and Workflow – Zack Lewis, Harvard University “I am a sixth year graduate student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. I started a transcriptomics project with little experience in coding and no experience in high powered computing (HPC). Without Bob Freeman’s work through ACI-REF I do not think I would have been able to complete my bioinformatics project. I was not aware of ACI-REF at the time I started my HPC bioinformatics work. To my good fortune I happened to connect with Bob Freeman at the weekly Research Computing office hours. Bob has accompanied me nearly every step of the way along my 6 month journey into HPC. Bob’s help has taken the form of instruction on coding, monitoring active jobs, writing and adapting scripts for my project, as well as connecting me with researchers working on similar problems or at similar stages in learning transcriptomics. In particular, building connections with other researchers at Harvard through ACI-REF has been one of the most useful experiences. I now often work through my HPC issues with graduate student and postdoc peers that I have connected with through Bob.” – Zack Lewis, Harvard University PhD Candidate, on Harvard ACI-REF Bob Freeman

Year 1 Successes CUDA Workshops – Various Researchers, University of Southern California Workshops on CUDA has increased the use of the 264, dual NVidia K20 compute nodes within the HPC cluster, as well as within individual labs. The vendor workshop help in the summer of 2014 provided the opportunity for researchers to get hands on with the code and hardware. Several leveraged this knowledge increasing analysis and visualization. Dr. Richard Weinberg from USC’s Cinematic Arts implemented this for his 4k visualization of nano-scale wire formation movie. He is also part of the USC CC-NIE grant, Trojan Express Network –II (ACI-1341014), which utilizes USC’s 100G connection to Internet2’s Advanced Layer2 Service network. He has created a six-week marine biology video microscopy course with a high school in the STEM program in Chattanooga Tennessee, to start this spring. This project is collaborating with several of the ITS internal groups as well as CENIC, I2, US Ignite, University of Tennessee, and their consultants.

Membership Requirements

•  Membership in the ACI-REF Consortium is constituted by a written commitment via formal letter from the organization or campus in three (3) main areas:

•  Funding one or more facilitator position(s) for the duration of their organization or campus’ membership in the consortium;

•  Promoting the professional development and inclusion of the facilitator(s) in [ACI-REF] Consortium activities, events, and meetings; and

•  Payment of an annual membership fee, TBD

QUESTIONS?