XSede is an advanced digital services ecosystem aimed at accelerating scientific discovery by enhancing researcher productivity through diverse resources and services. It has strategic goals to deepen, extend, and sustain its infrastructure while collaborating with international computing infrastructures. Supported by a five-year $121 million grant from the NSF, XSede focuses on innovative and reliable service delivery to a broad scientific community.

1. November 17, 2013
XSEDE: an ecosystem of advanced digital
services accelerating scientific discovery
John Towns
PI and Project Director, XSEDE
Director, Collaborative eScience Programs, NCSA
jtowns@ncsa.illinois.edu

2. XSEDE – accelerating scientific discovery
XSEDE aspires to be the place to go to access
digital research services.
Accelerate scientific discovery by enhancing the
productivity of researchers, engineers, and
scholars through the use of advanced digital
services and infrastructure.
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3. 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
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4. Innovation: proactively looking to expand
scope of capabilities
• Striking a balance between providing stable, reliable
services and fostering innovation
– both in what we are doing and how we do it
• Campus Bridging use cases are mostly for capabilities
we have not traditionally supported
• Novel and Innovative Projects team is seeking out new
communities and identifying new capabilities
necessary to support them
• Architecture design processes explicitly support
innovation by the project
– more importantly, facilitate innovation by the community
Our goal is to deliver new capabilities – and thus new science – faster
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5. XSEDE Factoids: high order bits
• 5 year, $121M project
– plus $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
eScience infrastructure
– coordinate allocations, training and documentation for
>$100M of concurrent project awards from NSF
• ~140 FTE (~250 individuals) across 19 partner
institutions
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6. XSEDE’s Strategic Goals
• Deepen and extend the use of the XSEDE ecosystem
– deepen use of XSEDE by existing researchers
– extend use of XSEDE 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 XSEDE infrastructure
– create an open and evolving infrastructure
– enhance the array of technical expertise and support services
offered
• Sustain the XSEDE infrastructure
– sustain a reliable and secure infrastructure
– provide excellent user support services
– operate an effective and innovative virtual organization
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7. What is XSEDE?
• An ecosystem of advanced digital services
– 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 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
• A project funded by the National Science
Foundation
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8. Total Research Funding Supported by XSEDE
in FY2013
US$700 million in research
supported by XSEDE
in FY2013
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9. What do you mean by “Advanced Digital
Services?”
•
Often use the terms “resources” and “services”
– these should be interpreted very broadly
– most are likely not operated by XSEDE
•
Examples of resources
– compute engines: HPC, HTC (high throughput computing), campus,
departmental, research group, project, …
– data: simulation output, input files, instrument data, repositories, public
databases, private databases, …
– instruments: telescopes, beam lines, sensor nets, shake tables, microscopes, …
– infrastructure: local networks, wide-area networks, …
•
Examples of services
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–
–
–
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collaboration: wikis, forums, telepresence, …
data: data transport, data management, sharing, curation, provenance, …
access/used: authentication, authorization, accounting, …
coordination: meta-queuing, …
support: helpdesk, consulting, ECSS, training, …
And many more: education, outreach, community building, …

10. XSEDE offers a variety of resources
• Leading-edge distributed memory systems
• Very large shared memory systems
• High throughput systems, including Open
Science Grid (OSG)
• Visualization engines
• Accelerators like GPUs and Xeon PHIs
Many scientific problems have components that
call for use of more than one architecture.
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11. Approach to Other Infrastructures:
Active Interactions
• OSG is a significant CI in the US – Level 2 Service Provider in XSEDE
– the nation’s premier high-throughput computing infrastructure
• complement traditional HPC resources inherited from TeraGrid
– ties to CI (eScience infrastructure) providers internationally
• PRACE is a significant HPC CI in Europe
– PRACE represents both large scale HPC and distributed resources
• subsumed DEISA in 2011
– joint Summer School series
– working on joint call for collaborations support later this calendar year
• EGI is a significant HTC CI in Europe
– initiating organizational benchmarking effort
– identifying collaborating research teams spanning XSEDE-EGI
• HPC Wales
– Champions programs, Science Gateways
– training content
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12. Some Unexpected Challenges:
XSEDE is a socio-technical ecosystem
• Highly distributed organization
– challenges in managing a project that involves
staff at 19 partner institutions
• A completely virtual organization
– breaking new ground from an organizational
structure and management point of view
• Highly distributed engineering project
– developing new methodologies to adapt
traditional practices to the unusual context of
XSEDE
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13. XSEDE Software Engineering Processes
Need for new
capabilities
Requirements, Use Cases, Qualities
Architecture Design, Documentation
A&D, S&SE
Focus
Architecture Review
Bug fixes,
routine
enhancements
documented architecture
Detailed Engineering Plans
Design, Development, Integration
SD&I
Focus
Integration Test
production-ready software
Operations
enhancements
Acceptance Test
User Documentation
User
Experience
Production Support
User
s
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Operations
Focus
Pilot
s
supported software and services
(TEOS, ECSS)
Service Providers

14. A Few Highlights from Past Year
Transitioning from a project in “start-up” mode to regular delivery of
value to a broad community of researchers
• Facilitated broad range of ground-breaking research
• Added powerful new resources and transitioned users
smoothly
– integrated/coordinated documentation
• Initiated development of undergraduate and graduate
certificate and degree programs
• Campus Champions reached new heights
– 200 Champions at 147 institutions
• Delivered new or improved software, services and
capabilities on a regular basis
– new POPS user interface, new GridFTP version, xdusage utility,
new RT ticket system, UNICORE client and server, Globus Online
services
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15. Current Status:
excellent production operations, improving new services
• Recent annual review held in June
– very strong review from panel
– either doing well or on the right track to address
issues
• Clear objectives of the panel
– make sure XSEDE is successful in major review
next year
– position XSEDE as a leader in the community
• beyond the scope of an NSF project
– develop sustainability for XSEDE for the long term
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16. Objectives for Coming Year+
Accelerating the realization of the XSEDE vision
• Deliver new or improved software, services and capabilities on a
regular basis
– XSEDE Wide Area Filesystem; Global Federated Filesystem; enhanced
single sign-on; 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 third cadre of under-represented students into the
XSEDE Scholars program
• Expand Champions Program to include Regional, Student, and Domain
Champions
• Redesign and implement a new allocations request system
• Complete baseline architecture and expanded set of defined Use
Cases
• Develop joint activities with industry
• Further develop relationships with other resource, service and
infrastructure providers
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17. What keeps me up at night? - #3
Sustainability of funding (how apropos)
• XSEDE in year 3 of 5 year project
– Can we secure an additional 5 years of funding?
• How do we sustain after 10 years?
– Can we avoid disruptive nature
of re-compete while still
deriving best value?
– Will NSF even continue to
fund such an activity?
• Is NSF definition of “sustainable”
that they no longer fund it?
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18. Call for participation to be announced before SC13!

19. Questions?