Inside XSEDE - June 2018

XSEDE All-Staff Meeting and Photo at PEARC18

The XSEDE All-Staff Meeting at PEARC18 is scheduled for Thursday, July 26th from 1:30-3 p.m. in the Kings Garden 1 room. If you're registered for PEARC, please plan on attending this meeting as we will have several important updates and will be taking an XSEDE all-staff photo.

XRAS Going Live at NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory July 1

To manage its allocations processes, XSEDE developed the XSEDE Resource Allocations System (XRAS). With XRAS, XSEDE handles more than 200 allocation requests at each of its quarterly

allocation meetings along with more than 200 Startup, Education, and other requests received continually each quarter. XRAS was developed as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool with the

goal of allowing other organizations to leverage XSEDE’s investment for the national research computing infrastructure. After being deployed for XSEDE in 2014, XRAS was adopted as the

production allocations system for the Computational and Information Systems Lab (CISL) at NCAR in 2015. It is also being used by the CADENS project at NCSA, and as of July 1st, 2018, will be used by NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory to request deployment facilities that include request of airplanes. Thank you to the RAS A3M team for their efforts in making this rollout possible!

New XSEDE Code of Conduct

XSEDE is committed to providing an inclusive and harassment-free environment in all interactions regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, or religion. The new code of conduct for all XSEDE-sponsored events and services (in-person training, webinars, committee meetings, networking functions, online forums, chat rooms, and social media) and interactions between staff, users, and volunteers is available at https://www.xsede.org/codeofconduct .

XCI Announcements

The XSEDE Cyberinfrastructure Integration (XCI) team has recently released a new v1.4-1 version of the Information Publishing Framework (IPF). IPF enables XSEDE Service Providers to programmatically publish information about the software and services available to users of their resources. IPF version 1.4-1 includes 1) installation and configuration improvements, 2) publishing of GPU information when available from SLURM, 3) ability for SPs to publish support contacts for software/services available in their Community Software Areas, 4) publishing of which software packages are available in a user's default login environment, and 5) publishing of IPF version information so that XSEDE can better track what each SP is running. The new IPF deployment plan is available here . All Level 1 and 2 Service Provides (SPs) are asked to deploy this new IPF version 1.4-1 by 8/31/2018.

The Community Software Repository (CSR) enables the community to discover software available from XSEDE, Science Gateways, campuses, and other organizations. The CSR now includes a directory of software support contacts, and the ability for software providers and operators to associate their software support contact information (website, e-mail, and/or a phone number) with each software component they advertise. The directory of registered Software Support Contacts is available here . To register new Software Support Contacts, software providers and operators should e-mail help@xsede.org using the subject "Please register a new Software Support Contact in the CSR."

Dan Voss, Campus Champions Fellow for XCI, is testing virtual cluster software developed with the help of staff at SDSC at a campus cluster in Nebraska. The virtual cluster software will allow the creation of clusters as virtual systems on campus resources analogous to those provided on the Comet XSEDE resource. This software will enable flexible configurations on campus resources without reconfiguration of the underlying system. Contact the XCI team via help@xsede.org for more details.

We want your software ideas! If you have ideas on new software and software based services that would help you use cyberinfrastructure more effectively, or how XSEDE could improve existing software and services, please send them to help@xsede.org . The mission of the XSEDE Cyberinfrastructure Integration (XCI) team is to enable users to leverage national CI using advanced software and services. We look forward to your input.

XSEDE Sub-award/Partner PIs

There have been a few changes over the last year in XSEDE Institution representation. Please see the list below for partner PIs if you need a refresher.

Partner - PI

Cornell - David Lifka

Georgia Tech - Lizanne Destafano

Indiana University - Craig Stewart

NCAR - David Hart

NCSA - John Towns

NICS - Greg Peterson

Notre Dame (PY7-PY10) - Nick Berente

Oklahoma State (OSU) - Dana Brunson

Ohio Supercomputing Center (OSC) - Kate Cahill

PSC - Sergiu Sanielevici

Purdue - Carol Song

SDSC - Bob Sinkovits

Shodor - Bob Panoff

SURA - Linda Akli

TACC - Kelly Gaither

University of Arkansas - Jeff Pummill

University of Chicago - Ian Foster

University of Georgia (PY6-PY7) - Nick Berente

University of Oklahoma (OU) - Henry Neeman

USC-ISI - Ewa Deelman

The TACC Institutes: Immersive Training in Advanced Computation

Get ready to learn from experts at TACC! The TACC Institute Series offers attendees five days of intense, immersive training in advanced computation with topics ranging from developing parallel applications for modern high performance computers to visualizing and analyzing large data sets to administering leadership-class advanced computing systems and more! The next Institutes to take place are: "Data Intensive Computing and Machine Learning" and "Computational Techniques for Life Sciences," July 16-20. Registration deadlines are July 7 and July 9, respectively.