With ACCESS, NSF has awarded $52 million over five years to five lead institutions and their sub-awardees to facilitate the program. These functional areas endeavor to provide seamless experiences across an innovative array of high-performance national computational resources.
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 a help and community hub for researchers and educators using ACCESS resources. It provides access to the help ticket system, a unified search interface across ACCESS and resource provider documentation, a curated Knowledge Base, a listing of community announcements, and a calendar of training events and workshops broadcast via a bi-weekly email digest. Users can also access the ACCESS Resource Advisor for infrastructure recommendations, the Software Discovery Service to locate software on specific HPC systems, and information about tools. An ACCESS Q&A bot is available as a floating assistant on every page for instant answers to common questions. Community features include Affinity Groups, used extensively by resource providers to communicate events and announcements, the Cyberinfrastructure Support Specialist Network (CSSN), connections to the Ask.CI Q&A platform, and a community badge recognition system.
- general user assistance
- allocation and utilization assistance ??
- 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.
- monitoring and measurement operations
- service model ??
- data analytics framework ??
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
- coordinated community-building activities