The ACCESS program is divided into five functional areas, each with dedicated teams and partners focused on ensuring the best possible experiences for the researchers, educators and students who use ACCESS resources. The Operations team is focused on working with the institutions that provide resources to the program.
The ACCESS Allocations team helps researchers and educators request and manage projects – no matter the size of the institution, the scale of the planned work or the scientific domain – on national cyberinfrastructure resources to support their research, education and development efforts. We do this using the XRAS platform. The team also works closely with Resource Providers to ensure they have the proper information to review and support requests for their resources, instruments or services.
ACCESS Support is the help and community hub for researchers and educators using ACCESS resources — bringing together a help ticket system, unified search across ACCESS and resource provider documentation, a curated Knowledge Base, community announcements, and a training events calendar, all summarized in a biweekly digest.
Additional tools include the ACCESS Resource Advisor, the Software Documentation Service, and a Q&A bot for instant answers. Community features include Affinity Groups, the Cyberinfrastructure Support Specialist Network (CSSN), the Ask.CI Q&A platform, and a community badge system.
- general user assistance
- assistance selecting a resource
- end-user training
- a computational science support network
ACCESS Operations delivers innovative integrations across the NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure ecosystem in the areas of operations, data and networking, and cybersecurity. Step-by-step integration roadmaps and modular concepts enable entirely new kinds of cyberinfrastructure resources to fully participate in the coordinated national cyberinfrastructure securely and with greater control. Additionally, the team’s Student Training and Engagement Program (STEP) provides students with training on marketable skills in the areas of operations, data and networking, and cybersecurity.
The ACCESS Metrics team is responsible for monitoring and measurement of the NSF-funded ACCESS cyberinfrastructure facilities, including compute, storage and networking. This data is collected in a database and accessed via XDMoD. Members of five institutions comprise this group, including University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Tufts University, Case Western Reserve University and San Diego Supercomputer Center.
- ACCESS XDMoD
- team members
- publications
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), in partnership with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), comprise the ACCESS Coordination Office (ACO), which provides the structures and services to support shared governance, community input and communication and outreach for the various ACCESS functional areas. The ACO is a critical conduit for sharing information, facilitating collaboration and providing shared tools across the ACCESS program.
- support for top-level governance among all functional areas
- coordination of an external advisory board
- ACCESS news and communications