Welcome to PEARC20! PEARC20’s theme is “Catch the Wave.” This year’s theme embodies the spirit of the community’s drive to stay on pace and in front of all the new waves in technology, analytics, and a globally connected and diverse workforce. We look forward to this year’s PEARC20 virtual meeting, where we can share scientific discovery and craft the future infrastructure.
The conference will be held in Pacific Time (PT) and the times listed below are in Pacific Time.
The connection information for all PEARC20 workshops, tutorials, plenaries, track presentations, BOFs, Posters, Visualization Showcase, and other affiliated events, are in the PEARC20 virtual conference platform, Brella. If you have issues joining Brella, please email pearcinfo@googlegroups.com.
The landscape of research in science and engineering is largely reliant on computation and data processing. There is continued and expanded usage by disciplines that have historically used advanced computing resources, new usage by disciplines that have not traditionally used HPC, and new modalities for usage in emerging areas such as Data Science, Machine Learning, and other areas of AI. Along with these new patterns have come new advanced computing resource methods and approaches, including the availability of commercial cloud resources with capabilities comparable to on-premises facilities. The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) has long been an advocate representing the needs of academic researchers using computational resources, sharing best practices and offering advice to create a national cyberinfrastructure to meet US science, engineering, and other academic computing needs. CASC has begun what we intend to be an annual survey of academic cloud and data center usage and return on investment reporting practices to improve understanding of current patterns and changes over time. This paper presents the motivation for understanding this usage, gives an overview of interesting results from initial surveys, and outlines future steps towards developing a reliable longitudinal survey to assess trends in cloud and data center usage and return on investments in these areas. We note that on-premises computational resources, commercial cloud resources, and national cyberinfrastructure projects such as XSEDE (the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), OSG (Open Science Grid), and CaRCC (Campus Research Computing Consortium) all fall within the broad category of cyberinfrastructure (cite paper below ). Cloud computing in particular is one form of, not something distinct from, cyberinfrastructure. Critically important findings from this first survey include the following: many of the respondents are engaged in some form of analysis of return in research computing investments, but only a minority currently report the results of such analyses to their upper-level administration. Most respondents are experimenting with use of commercial cloud resources but no respondent indicated that they have found use of commercial cloud services to create financial benefits compared to their current methods. There is clear correlation between levels of investment in research cyberinfrastructure and the scale of both cpu core-hours delivered and the financial level of supported research grants. Also interesting is that almost every respondent indicated that they participate in some sort of national cooperative or nationally provided research computing infrastructure project and most were involved in academic computing-related organizations, indicating a high degree of engagement by institutions of higher education in building and maintaining national research computing ecosystems. Institutions continue to evaluate cloud-based HPC service models, despite having generally concluded that so far cloud HPC is too expensive to use compared to their current methods.
