1. July 14, 2014
State of XSEDE: XSEDE14
John Towns
PI and Project Director, XSEDE
Director, Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure Programs, NCSA
jtowns@ncsa.illinois.edu

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3. Welcome to XSEDE14 !!
Challenge: By the end of the meeting, talk with 5
people you have never met before for at least 15
minutes each

4. State of XSEDE
• What is XSEDE?
• Highlights of the past year
• Objectives for the coming year+
• September Review
4

5. Motivation for XSEDE:
• Scientific advancement across multiple disciplines
requires a variety of resources and services
• XSEDE is about increased productivity of the
community and providing expanded capabilities
– leads to more science
– is sometimes the difference between a feasible project
and an impractical one
– lowers barriers to adoption
• XSEDE provides a comprehensive eScience
infrastructure composed of expertly managed and
evolving advanced heterogeneous digital resources and
services integrated into a general-purpose
infrastructure
5

6. XSEDE – accelerating scientific discovery
• XSEDE’s Vision:
a world of digitally enabled researchers,
engineers, and scholars participating in
multidisciplinary collaborations to tackle society’s
grand challenges
• XSEDE’s Mission:
to substantially enhance the productivity of a
growing community of researchers, engineers,
and scholars through access to advanced digital
services that support open research
6

7. XSEDE’s Strategic Goals
• Deepen and extend the use of the advanced digital research
services ecosystem
– deepen use by existing researchers, engineers, and scholars
– extend use to new communities
– prepare the current and next generation via education, training, and
outreach
– raise the general awareness of the value of advanced digital services
• Advance the advanced digital research services ecosystem
– create an open and evolving e-infrastructure
– enhance the array of technical expertise and support services offered
• Sustain the advanced digital research services ecosystem
– assure and maintain a reliable and secure infrastructure
– provide excellent user support services
– operate an effective and innovative virtual organization
7

8. What is XSEDE?
• An ecosystem of advanced digital services accelerating
scientific discovery
– support a growing portfolio of resources and services
• advanced computing, high-end visualization, data analysis, and other
resources and services
• interoperability with other infrastructures
• A virtual organization (partnership!) providing
– dynamic distributed infrastructure
– support services, and technical expertise to enable researchers
engineers and scholars
• addressing the most important and challenging problems facing the
nation and world
• More than just a project funded by the National Science
Foundation
– XSEDE is a path finding experiment in how to develop, deploy
and support e-science infrastructure.
8

9. XSEDE Factoids: high order bits
• 5 year, US$121M project
– plus US$9M, 5 year Technology Investigation Service
• separate award from NSF
– option for additional 5 years of funding upon major review after
PY3
• No funding for major hardware
– coordination, support and creating a national/international
cyberinfrastructure
– coordinate allocations, support, training and documentation for
>$100M of concurrent project awards from NSF
• ~140 FTE /~250 individuals funded across 20 partner
institutions
– this requires solid partnering!
9

10. Total Research Funding Supported by XSEDE
in Program Year 3
10
$767 million in research
supported by XSEDE
in PY3
(July 2013-June 2014)

11. Highlights from Past Year
Hitting our stride—regular delivery of value to a broad community of
researchers
• Facilitated broad range of ground-breaking research
• Provided in-depth support contributing to improved user
productivity
• Added powerful new resources and transitioned users
smoothly
– integrated/coordinated documentation
• Furthered development of undergraduate and graduate
certificate and degree programs
• Moved to new metrics-based approach to reporting program
progress
• User survey and PI interviews show high degree of satisfaction
of XSEDE services
11

12. Highlights from Past Year (cont’d)
Hitting our stride—regular delivery of value to a broad community of
researchers
• Training workshops – online and in person – attracted more
than 14,000 participants
• Campus Bridging delivered initial "XSEDE Compatible"
cluster build tools and use of Globus Online and GFFS for
data movement and access
• Campus Champions reached new heights
– more than 200 Champions at over 175 institutions
• Improved publications tracking with extended profiles in
XSEDE User Portal
– first work from TAS group to calculate citation-based indices,
based on XSEDE-supported publications
12

13. Objectives for Coming Year+
Accelerating the realization of the XSEDE vision
• Deliver new or improved software, services and capabilities
on a regular basis
– enhanced single sign-on; identity management infrastructure;
science gateway APIs; Canonical Use Case components
• Campus Bridging will promote "XSEDE Compatible" cluster
build tools and use of Globus Online and GFFS for data
movement and access
• Incorporate the fourth cadre of under-represented
students into the XSEDE Scholars program
• Continue to assists in creation of certificate and degree
programs in computational science at higher education
institutions
13

14. Objectives for Coming Year+ (cont’d)
Accelerating the realization of the XSEDE vision
• Roll-out of a new allocations request system—XRAS
• Native mobile versions of the XSEDE User Portal for iOS and
Android
• Complete baseline architecture and expanded set of
defined Use Cases
• Deliver a Shared Virtual Compute Facility using global
queues spanning both campus and XSEDE resources
• Further develop relationships with other resource, service
and infrastructure providers
– Compute Canada, NAREGI (Japan)
14

15. September Review of XSEDE by NSF
• Major review of XSEDE
– accomplishments of first three years of the project
– current status of project
– trajectory going forward
• More than just an annual review
– will be basis for NSF decision on possible future funding of
XSEDE
• If you would like to see XSEDE continue without
interruption
– talk to your NSF program officer
– talk to XSEDE’s NSF program officer: Rudi Eigenmann
– talk to other NSF staff: CISE Director, ACI Director, other
program officers
– send us your statements of why XSEDE is important for you
15

18. Questions?