Towns speaks at the recent PEARC22 conference in Boston.

As the final keynote speaker at this year's ACM Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) conference, July 10-14 in Boston, John Towns, XSEDE leader since 2011, spoke on his experience guiding the National Science Foundation project with a particular focus on how community building was critical to the project's success. Introduced by XSEDE's Campus Engagement Co-manager, Dana Brunson, his address "XSEDE and Beyond or How did we get here and where are we going (as a community)?" took the audience not only through the highlights of the project but also the insights he's gained along the way.

Starting on the national cyberinfrastructure work as the TeraGrid Forum chair, Towns was named principal investigator and project director for XSEDE in 2011. He recalled deep divides at the start of the project due to what he characterized as a difficult, disruptive awards process. "As a virtual organization of people who often compete for solicitations, they needed to understand how to compartmentalize their activities and align with the larger goals of the project," he said. From his perspective, it took XSEDE a bit more than three years to hit its stride. By then, it was time to analyze lessons learned as XSEDE2, which ran from 2016 to 2022, was being planned and then ramped up. 

The community did, indeed, benefit from coming together and today researchers using XSEDE-allocated resources number around 11,500 and domains have grown in diversity to include archaeology, finance, genomics and machine learning. The diversity of the partner institutions in XSEDE, Towns said, brought strength to the partnerships and also leveraged various strengths of different institutions – including smaller institutions. Trust, he said, was the most important factor contributing to XSEDE's success.

"What's most important to success is less about proximity to machines and more about proximity to humans." – John Towns, PI/Project Director, XSEDE 

As the 11-year project winds down, and the community looks ahead to Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), NSF's follow-on project, Towns continues to extoll the virtues of building relationships and learning from each other. He said the community needs greater coherence and to celebrate its success the way other professions do to the convey the importance of what they do. To expand the community beyond those funded by NSF grants. To better prepare technical people for management roles and to create career paths beyond the technical. Ultimately, he said, "what's most important to success is less about proximity to machines and more about proximity to humans."

Read HPCWire's full account here.