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Advanced User Support Services (AUSS)

Advanced User Support Services (AUSS) brings the best available knowledge and skills to bear on the most challenging science issues to maximize the impact of science and engineering results achieved by the XSEDE user community. In depth staff support, lasting weeks to up to a year in length, is available to all researchers and can be requested at any time through the XSEDE allocations process. [insert link to some text that describes how to request AUSS support – start up and TRAC procedures].  Expertise is available in a wide range of areas, from performance analysis and petascale optimization techniques to gateway and web portal experience. Contract hiring will allow the team to bring in specialized staff as necessary.

The AUSS team will also aggressively solicit candidate science or engineering research problems from domains, institutions and communities that can exploit advanced computing capabilities but have not traditionally made use of these facilities. The team will seek collaboration with NSF-funded software programs such as PetaApps to optimize software benefiting communities on XSEDE architectures. In addition, AUSS will support training, education, and outreach programs to foster integration of research and education. AUSS projects fall into four categories: Advanced Support for Research Teams (ASRT), Advanced Support for Community Capabilities (ASCC), Advanced Support for Training Education and Outreach (ASTEO), and the Novel and Innovative Projects (NIP) that can intersect with any of these.

Advanced Support for Research Teams (ASRT)

An Advanced Support of Research Teams (ASRT) project is a collaborative effort between an XSEDE user group and one or more AUSS staff members, the goal of which is to enhance the research group's capability to transform knowledge using XSEDE resources and related technologies. Typical ASRT projects will last for six months to one year. The XSEDE ASRT program will build upon the XSEDE ASTA program and will complete any ASTA projects that are active at the start of XSEDE.

Examples of ASRT projects:

  • optimization and scaling of application codes to use 10,000-way parallelism or more per job
  • aggregating petabyte databases from distributed heterogeneous sources and mining them interactively
  • helping to discover and adapt the best work and data flow solution for simulation projects that generate ~100 TB of persistent data per 24-hour run

Advanced Support for Community Capabilities (ASCC)

Advanced Support of Community Capabilities (ASCC) efforts are aimed at deploying, hardening, and optimizing software systems necessary for extensive research communities to create new knowledge using XSEDE resources and related technologies. ASCC projects will include collaboration with the developers of widely used community codes and tools and may include industrial partners. Projects of this type will also support communities that wish to use XSEDE resources via science gateways and/or data repositories.

Examples of ASCC projects:

  • Implementation of new workflows for automation of scientific processes
  • Incorporation of new visualization methods
  • Innovative scheduling implementation
  • Integration of XSEDE resources into a portal or Science Gateway

Advanced Support for Training, Education and Outreach (ASTEO)

Experts from among the AUSS staff will prepare and deliver content for selected activities organized by the XSEDE Training, Education and Outreach Service (TEOS). ASTEO staff will be on the front lines of engagement with current and prospective users and will refer information and leads to AUSS management for follow-up action. With sufficient demand, AUSS staff can deliver training, education and outreach events locally. Please direct inquiries and requests to help@xsede.org.

Examples of ASTEO activities:

  • Developing online tutorials on MPI, Hybrid, PGAS, and CUDA programming
  • Delivering in-person workshop on data mining and visualization techniques in Astronomy using XSEDE resources.
  • Attending at a meeting of the Society of Black Engineers to give a presentation about Computational Fluid Dynamics and Structural Mechanics capabilities supported in XSEDE
  • Working with an expert from the Shodor Foundation to develop a computational physics module for undergraduate semester-length courses

Advanced Support for Novel and Innovative Projects (NIP)

Novel and Innovative Projects will be specifically targeted at advanced support for broadening participation in XSEDE. The NIP leader and staff will work closely with the XSEDE outreach team to seek out user groups, communities, and digital services that have not benefitted from traditional HPC approaches but that now stand to benefit from the quantitative and qualitative revolution brought about by XSEDE.

Examples of novel and innovative projects:

  • Novel science areas e.g. biodiversity, linguistics, humanities
  • Non-traditional applications and programming modes, e.g. data analytics and informatics
  • Demographic diversity e.g. researchers based at MSIs and EPSCoR institutions, SBIR recipients
  • Innovative technologies for e.g. streaming from instruments, mobile clients, integration of distributed, heterogeneous databases