Inside XSEDE: February 2020

Program Announcements

A note from XSEDE PI, John Towns

All —

As I watch the snow fall and I begin to itch for the warmer days of spring, I can't help but consider the work we are engaging in now in developing the seeds we will plant and which will bloom as our PY10 plan. As I am sure many have heard me say before, this is a period of the year I very much like as we plan for our accomplishments in the next project year, and, in this case, the final project year of this award. The XSEDE Collaboration has made incredible progress during the course of the two awards we have earned and I look forward to our capstone year in PY10. It is already the case that we have brought great

value to the community and established critical services to enable research across the country.

I am also looking forward to what comes after our current award. I believe thinking about transition plans and preparing our response to the "NSF OAC Vision & Blueprint: Coordination Services" document have helped us to refine our thinking about the future. At this point, we still await a solicitation for the follow-on program. We are thinking about that, but perhaps I am getting ahead of myself a bit.

We have a considerable amount of work over the next few months as we prepare our PY10 program plan and also our RY4 annual report leading up to our annual review in June. As I review various materials such as our review panel report from last year, our annual user survey data and our staff climate survey report, I am struck by how effective and efficient a team we have become. The initial review of plans during the upcoming Quarterly Meeting is a milestone I am looking forward to. An observation I have had is that the discussions I am having with folks have become even less about *how* we are conducting the planning process and much more on *what* we are planning.

And all of this goes on as the team continues to perform with excellence in executing our current plans. So many things are occurring in parallel, including the ECSS Symposia, the rollout of new capabilities, outreach events, exploring co-allocation of resources with PRACE and RIST, maintaining high levels of availability and reliability of our in infrastructure, and more.

As we proceed with planning and execution, I encourage you all to pause occasionally and consider how far this team has come, all that it has accomplished, and our potential for the future.

Thanks!

-John

XSEDE Cyberinfrastructure Integration (XCI) Updates

XSEDE Information Services APIs enable XSEDE users, developers, and services to access public information about compute/cloud/storage resources, software, network services, and other types of XSEDE resources. A new set of secure APIs now enable authenticated access to non-public information like user batch jobs and XSEDE users names, e-mail addresses, and institutions. API authentication is based on the same OAuth web standards and related technologies used by Google, ORCID, Facebook, Auth0, and many other internet technology companies. To access this non-public information the user must authenticate to XSEDE and grant the applications they are using access to their batch job or user information. Developers interested in using these APIs in their portals, gateways, Jupiter Hubs, or other applications can learn more from the developer documentation .

Due to XSEDE’s support for the REFEDS Assurance Framework , XSEDE users on active allocations can now obtain higher assurance X.509 certificates from the CILogon Silver CA by visiting https://cilogon.org/ and logging on with their XSEDE identities. Higher assurance X.509 certificates are required for access to some XSEDE partner infrastructures, such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). More information is available at https://ca.cilogon.org/policy/silver .

The ECSS and XCI teams launched a new Expanding XSEDE Software Capabilities through Community Collaboration initiative , which invites software developers and services operators to collaborate with XSEDE to make their software and services more readily available to XSEDE users. The launch involved publishing an informational web page for potential collaborators, and reaching out to four XSEDE letter-of-collaboration recipients inviting them to participate. Two of the four invitees responded in short order and held initial exploratory meetings with ECSS and XCI. For the next phase of the initiative we are considering reaching out to XSEDE Service Provider forum members with un-allocated (level 3) resources and to campuses that have participated in XSEDE's Campus Bridging program. All research software and service providers that would like to explore a collaboration are invited to reach out to ECSS and XCI as described in the informational web page .

Recognize your fellow XSEDE staff members!

Is there an XSEDE staff member you would like to recognize for doing great work? If so, nominate them to be recognized in a future issue of Inside XSEDE! All staff are welcome to submit nominations!

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Community Announcements & Events

Apply for a one-on-one engagement with Trusted CI

Trusted CI is now accepting applications until April 3 for July-December 2020 engagements. Engagements are multi-month collaborations between Trusted CI and other projects to tackle their cybersecurity challenges like creating a cybersecurity program, software security assessments, secure design, evaluations, privacy, etc.