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Smooth Transition: XSEDE's Advanced User Support Services
Smooth Transition: XSEDE's Advanced User Support Services
by Michael Schneider, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
Among segues, one of the most famous comes at the close of the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as a serene, nearly silent moment transforms seamlessly into the glorious energy of this great work's last movement. It may be unreasonable to expect a similar ease and beauty in transition for U.S. computational scientists as NSF's TeraGrid program, which has provided cyberinfrastructure (CI) resources to the research community for more than 10 years, transforms into XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment. As the XSEDE team takes the reins, however, to guide the horses of NSF CI, smooth transition for users is the governing theme.
"This transition must be non-disruptive for users," says Ralph Roskies, co-scientific director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Roskies and Nancy Wilkins-Diehr of San Diego Supercomputer Center, TeraGrid's area director for Science Gateways, are leading Advanced User Support Services (AUSS), XSEDE's transformed program of collaborative support for computational science. From the users' perspective, says Roskies, the user-support function in TeraGrid worked well: "Users we interviewed and also responses from the 2010 TeraGrid User Survey identified human expertise and support people as the best thing about Phase II of TeraGrid."
(Users who have questions or experience problems concerning the transition to XSEDE should submit their concerns to help@xsede.org.)
With no desire to fix what isn't broken, Roskies and Wilkins-Diehr emphasize that AUSS's dedicated collaborative support for research projects, called Advanced Support for Research Teams (ASRT) under XSEDE, will stay more or less the same as TeraGrid's ASTA (Advanced Support for TeraGrid Applications). The effort will be to provide collaborative support to projects that need and can benefit from it.
"Overall we have the same level of staffing," says Wilkins-Diehr, "and many of the support staff from ASTA will also provide support through ASRT. We've analyzed the projects in play, and staffers assigned to TeraGrid projects are continuing, so our plan is that projects will experience no major cliffs."
Users will request advanced support much as they did in TeraGrid, adds Wilkins-Diehr. Requests are evaluated through the peer-review process that also grants computing time and then referred to the AUSS team, which follows up with users to establish a well-defined project plan for a collaboration lasting up to one year. Information on applying is available through the user portal (http://xsede.org).
Examples of the kind of support that ASRT will provide, says Roskies, include:
- optimization and scaling of application codes to 100,000 or more processors,
- aggregating petabyte databases from distributed sources to mine them interactively, and
- developing efficient dataflow solutions for simulations that generate 100 terabytes or more per 24-hour run.
AUSS planning has been diligent to assure a smooth transition in advanced support activity, but AUSS, nevertheless, is distinctively different from TeraGrid in organizational structure. Reflecting the more comprehensive focus of XSEDE, the AUSS effort extends beyond ASRT to encompass new and expanded facets of advanced support. Overall, AUSS subsumes five inter-related areas, each with its own leader:
- Advanced Support for Research Teams (ASRT, Mark Fahey, NICS),
- Novel and Innovative Projects (NIP, Sergiu Sanielevici, PSC),
- Advanced Support of Community Capabilities (ASCC, John Cazes, TACC),
- Advanced Support for Science Gateways (AS-SGW, Suresh Marru, Indiana University) and
- Advanced Support for Training, Education and Outreach (ASTEO, Galen Arnold, NCSA).
Roskies and Wilkins-Diehr, who are both co-principal investigators of XSEDE, divide responsibility in overseeing these AUSS areas, with Roskies in charge of ASRT and NIP and Wilkins-Diehr in charge of the other three. By providing a higher level of management for advanced support, this organizational structure itself represents a difference from TeraGrid, notes Wilkins-Diehr, in that she and Roskies can involve themselves more effectively in outreach and dissemination of new HPC insights gained through AUSS activities.
Related to this, one of the main differences from TeraGrid that AUSS will implement is an increased focus, through NIP, on novel and innovative projects. "We mean 'novel and innovative' in several senses," says Wilkins-Diehr. "We mean to expand support into domain areas, such as economics and computational linguistics, that typically aren't users of high-performance computing but can gain from using it. And we also mean to expand support to under-represented communities and institutions, such as colleges and universities that aren't the typical major research institutions, and also communities, such as women and minorities, that aren't associated with a particular institution."
"Through the NIP project leader," says Roskies, "we'll work with staff throughout AUSS and with the XSEDE outreach team to find and reach out to user groups, communities and digital services that are new to high-performance computing. We'll solicit input from advisory bodies, from NSF program directors and internally from XSEDE groups, especially in training, education and outreach and technology planning."
The Science Gateways, which Wilkins-Diehr headed under TeraGrid, will become AS-SGW, part of the community activities that Wilkins-Diehr directs. For ASCC, she sees the effort as involving optimization of widely used community codes, which could include interaction and collaboration with NSF software investments in PetaApps and other large community software projects.
In the ASTEO area, AUSS activities, says Wilkins-Diehr, will include participation in scientific conferences. "I think the most powerful way to show the impact of HPC is for researchers to see the impact it has had for someone else in their field." AUSS will also develop training modules on petascale programming techniques, both in general and specific to particular XSEDE systems.
Looking ahead, Wilkins-Diehr sees promise in extending AUSS support--beyond activities that happened in TeraGrid--through a program called Cyberinfrastructure Fellows that will interact with the Campus Champions program. "CI Fellows," she says, "will provide an extended user-support experience for campus champions. The idea--for which we'll still working out details--is to pair a champion with AUSS staff for extended work on a project, so that campus champions can learn new AUSS techniques and bring them back to their campuses."