Asset Publisher
NCSA's John Towns Talks About the NSF-funded XSEDE Project
NCSA's John Towns Talks About the NSF-funded XSEDE Project
John Towns, leader of the National Science Foundation's new Extreme Digital Science and Engineering project, talks about the vision for XSEDE and how it will build on the TeraGrid.
XSEDE is a follow-on project to the TeraGrid, although it is very different in nature in many ways. The TeraGrid has been an 11-year project, providing access primarily to high-performance computing resources and services. Under the XSEDE project, we'll expand that set of services to encompass more than just HPC.
XSEDE will provide access to additional digital services and resources.
Under XSEDE, we will expand the umbrella, if you will, of resources and services that will be accessible to researchers around the country and their collaborators internationally. This means shared access to campus-level resources, interoperability with other cyberinfrastructures, access to data off of instruments, and a whole host of other additional services that will be available to the research community.
Really the key element here that we've been going after with XSEDE, is about productivity of researchers in conducting their day-to-day research. To establish such an environment, a distributed environment, with the resources and services accessible to them, is really a cornerstone of our planning. And you'll note that I didn't say HPC, I didn't say compute resources. Because for some researchers, those are not as relevant as is access to data, as is access to collaboration tools, as is access to instruments, And so these things are not necessarily HPC resources. The HPC resources are still critical in general for the success of a lot of the research work, but the focus of the project is now on user and researcher productivity.
In order for researchers to be successful in their endeavors, they need to be able to operate in an environment that has at their disposal, all of the resources, services, data and collaboration tools that they need. Research no longer typically happens in the context of single investigators on a campus somewhere. They are typically collaborating with others at other institutions. They need access not only to resources they have direct control over locally, they'll need access to resources collaborators have, they'll need access to data sources that are managed by other projects, they'll need access to instruments, and they'll need access to computing resources. The intent with XSEDE is to create an environment in which all of these resources and services are available to researchers, whether they are formally operated by XSEDE or not.
I myself, and I think the folks who have been involved in the development of this project over the last three years, have really spent a lot of time and a lot of effort in developing a vision for not just providing cycles to researchers, but for establishing a cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. Something that allows us to interoperate with other resources, with other infrastructure providers, and to really to being to establish an ecosystem in which researchers and educators could be much more productive, and can begin to develop new capabilities.
A key element of our architectural design is that the project is expected to evolve. We have not designed a system that will be static for the next five or more years. It's specifically designed and has processes put in place to evolve the environment and the system over time as new technologies emerge, as new requirements are understood from the user community, as new communities engage with the project. So what I find most exciting is that we're entering into a time of evolving the overall activities that are funded out of OCI (Office of Cyberinfrastructure) and NSF to really allow inclusion of a lot more disciplinary areas and a lot more researchers who might not have had easy access to the resources in the past. So new disciplines, new users, and being able to increase productivity overall, I think is really exciting.
