Campus Bridging - many means

2013-07-25T15:13:18Z

This week at XSEDE 13, Scott Michael presented an example of Campus Bridging activities with Mark Lynch's project making use of mlRHO. Scott and his collaborators identify a number of activities that helped the Lynch lab bridge from campus resources at Indiana University to XSEDE resources. These included:

* Indentifying that the team had big data needs, rather than HPC needs
* Requesting an allocation and creating a scalability study
* Adapting code to run with XSEDE Scheduler environments (they helped the team move from hundreds of small serial job submissions to small numbers of BigJob submissions)
* Profiling code to identify points for improvement - Lynch's team made adaptations to the code in order to carry those out

Scott's team was able, with not a lot of effort, to provide considerable improvement to the Lynch lab's analyses. Code improvements carried out by the user team resulted in a 50x speedup. Many of the activities involved improving the users' understanding of XSEDE processes and letting them know about technologies (BigJobs for submission, Vampir for code profiling) that helped them get the job done.

Campus bridging is in many instances the art of pointing the way to resources that already exist in a way that allows users to understand the benefits they can attain. I think there are a lot of opportunities for finding potential XSEDE users and projects that involve just this sort of connection that includes some advocacy, some documentation, information sharting, and some project-specific interactions with users.

(CFP) Campus Bridging Early Adopter Call For Proposals

2011-11-30T20:56:42Z

For folks who are interested in the Early Adopter Program for Campus Bridging, we have additional information about the program and a sample proposal for people to look at.

The dates for sending Early Adopter proposals to campusbridging@xsede.org are Dec 1-9. Winning proposals will be notified by Monday, Dec 19.

Proposals will be evaluated with the following criteria:
Technical merit (corresponds to intellectual merit of NSF proposal):

Will the proposed project provide a good and thorough test of the capabilities that XSEDE GFFS offers?
Is the proposing team well qualified to offer critiques back to XSEDE about GFFS and the GFFS installers?
Does the clarity of the proposal instill confidence that pilot project can be well executed on the proposer's campus?

Broader impact:

Will the proposed project likely lead to broader adoption of GFFS on campus - and how many end users might be affected?
Does current/past use of XSEDE (and before it TeraGrid) suggest that the pilot will lead to immediate impact on current users of XSEDE?
And if not, is there a solid case that this pilot will lead to broader use of XSEDE on the proposing campus?
To what extent does the proposing team anticipate serving students from traditionally underserved groups (as defined by NSF)

Proposals are expected to deliver actionable user experiences back to the Architecture team within 6 months of initiating the Early Adopter Program.

For information about what should go into your Early Adopter proposal, please see the attached sample. You can also see a copy of the original CFP.