PEARC20

Ask.CI, a Q&A site for Research Computing, was launched at PEARC18. The goal of the site is to aggregate answers to a broad spectrum of questions that are commonly asked by the research computing community. As researchers, facilitators, staff, students, and other users ask and answer questions on Ask.CI, they are creating a shared knowledge base for the larger community and alleviating the burden of a central resource to provide support to a user base. For smaller institutions, this provides a wealth of knowledge that was not previously available in an easily searchable Q&A format. For larger institutions, this self-service model frees up time for facilitators and cyberinfrastructure engineers to focus on more advanced subject matter, thereby elevating the practice. Establishing a Q&A site of this nature requires some tenacity. In partnership with the Campus Champions, Ask.CI has gained traction, and continues to engage the broader community to establish the platform as a powerful tool for research computing. Since launch, Ask.CI has attracted over 250,000 page views (currently averaging nearly 5000 per week), over 400 contributors, hundreds of topics, and a broad audience that spans the US and parts of Europe and Asia. While Ask.CI has shown steady growth in both contributions and audience, it is still in its early stages. Finding ways to continue to grow audience participation through innovation and outreach is an ongoing focus of attention. In the past year, we introduced "Locales", which allow institutions to create subcategories on Ask.CI where they can experiment with posting institution-specific content and use of the site as a component of their user support strategy. At this BOF, the Ask.CI team and locale partners will discuss strategies, key accomplishments, challenges, and plans for the upcoming year.

Science gateways and, generally, cyberinfrastructure are designed to democratize access to scientific resources such as scientific software, computing, and data collections. Additional effort is needed to identify opportunities for supporting Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and understanding their requirements. This Birds-of-a-Feather session will provide a forum for increased communication between educators, researchers, and science gateway providers.

Open OnDemand is an NSF-funded open-source HPC portal based on OSC's original OnDemand portal. The goal of Open OnDemand is to provide an easy way for system administrators to provide web access to their HPC resources, including, but not limited to: -Plugin-free web experience -Easy file management -Command-line shell access -Job management and monitoring across different batch servers and resource managers -Graphical desktop environments and desktop applications This BoF is meant to be an open discussion to guide the future roadmap for Open OnDemand in the near term, by getting feedback from the community on the prioritization of the various tasks planned for the next few years. As there are many people that attended this BOF at PEARC'18 and PEARC'19 and spoke highly of them, the session leaders intend to replicate the same BOF format (with appropriate updates regarding what has been done in the past year and the roadmap for the current NSF award) and anticipate more attendees than were present at the previous BOFs. A report summarizing the status of current installations and additional feature requests will be generated and distributed to anyone that has expressed interest in Open OnDemand.

Systems professionals who are interested in high performance computing (HPC) are often left without curricula to study to advance their professional knowledge. Rarely there is a course at a university or college that is dedicated to the topics a professional would need to advance in their field. Available courses typically only teach system administration without an HPC treatment or teach HPC as a way to approach scientific problems and gloss over any information about the operation of HPC machines. As such, much learning is "on the job" and often in an apprenticeship learning model. Because of this, many entry-level computing professionals are not aware of the opportunities in the HPC field and may either not seek positions in this field or may feel overwhelmed with a lack of knowledge. When they do pursue these types of positions the on-ramp to being productive can be quite steep if they have no prior experience in HPC. High-throughput interconnects, parallel storage and issues of computing at scale are some of the barriers that must be overcome in addition to any basic system administration training they may need. This BoF will discuss efforts from a joint committee between two SIGHPC virtual chapters, the System Professionals (SYSPROS) chapter and the Education chapter, to promote the educational advancement of HPC systems professionals. While some of this BoF will be dedicated to reporting current efforts from the committee, much of the time will be dedicated to crowd-sourcing information on ways to develop, collect, and distribute information of interest to HPC system professionals.

Cloud computing is impacting every sector of computing and data as the scale and rapid deployment of new capabilities make these platforms more compelling, and yet the US Research and Education (R&E) community is not currently able to take full advantage of these platforms. A major impediment is the lack of suitable and sustainable training for the research support workforce. Navigating the multitude of training opportunities for cloud computing has proven challenging for institutions and research groups, both because current offerings are highly segmented and vendor specific, and as well because the materials are largely focused on enterprise IT staff and use-cases. We propose a Birds of a Feather session to bring together a community of research computing and data professionals to discuss how a community could gather and curate a shared set of training materials tailored to the R&E community, and develop online cohort-based training leveraging these materials.

Every year the scientific computing community decommissions $100Ms of equipment (based on original cost). The reasons for this are varied -- limited machine room space, limited power and cooling, limited IT management staff, new incoming hardware, etc. But often this hardware is still useful scientifically -- and PIs may wish to continue to operate it. In short there is a loss of scientific capability, in addition to shutdown and disposal costs, and the generation of e-waste. Our vision is to create, foster, and share best practices for new pathways that extend the operating lifetime of scientific computing equipment.

Working in Advanced Research Computing (ARC) can be tough-we all face technical challenges each and every day. Unfortunately, other factors can make members of certain groups feel like they don't quite fit in, which makes the job even tougher. In this Birds of a Feather session, we will share the resources that we have discovered in our experiences in ARC and hear from our colleagues about what other activities exist in our community. We would then like to end with a call to action. What can YOU do to make this community more inclusive, more willing to listen and respect the views of others, to become a community that embraces our differences and thrives from the diversity of thought!

The primary objective of this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session is to facilitate knowledge transfer on researcher training approaches. The BoF will include participants from various stakeholder groups. The topics discussed during this session will include both the "learner's perspective" in the form of effective teaching and learning, and the "institutional perspective" in the form of support, technology, and collaborations. Models of metrics and surveys adopted to quantitatively measure the effectiveness of these approaches will also be discussed.

Data transfers are a critical part of nearly every modern scientific workflow. The data sizes may range from small scripts written on a personal laptop to massive results generated by specialized scientific instruments. The transfer distances may span multiple networks across continents or simply across the street to another building. Regardless of the details, the efficiency of the workflow is inherently tied to the efficiency of the data transfer. The goal of this BoF is to open a dialog among all the stakeholders in these transfers: researchers, system administrators, network engineers, and other cyberinfrastructure personnel. Staff members of the XSEDE Data Transfer Services team will facilitate discussions about identifying and reporting data transfer issues, tools and services available to the community, and addressing data transfer performance issues.

This panel of tri-university speakers will discuss experiences and challenges faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the collaborative efforts to address challenges as a team and a state-wide community through the Arizona Research Computing (ARC) initiative. The purpose of this panel is to discuss the insights gained by research computing institutions in this time of crisis, and the efforts made by those groups to resolve and overcome the associated hardships. We hope by sharing lessons learned from this experience, that this discussion will lead to greater knowledge within our community. This is an opportunity to share the lessons and challenges that have been experienced with the hope that broader discussions and collaborations will result.

This Birds of a Feather (BoF) group session is aligned with other PEARC20 workshops and sessions associated with the Research Computing and Data (RCD) Capabilities Model. This model allows institutions to assess their support for computationally- and data-intensive research, to identify potential areas for improvement, and to understand how the broader community views RCD support. Application of this model within National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (NSF-EPSCoR) jurisdictions presents a set of potential challenges beyond typical expectations of model engagement and response quality. Institutions classified as NSF-EPSCoR-eligible are typically underfunded for research infrastructure and very often have minimal organized cyberinfrastructure support. As a result of this, participation in the RCD Capabilities Model assessment survey is likely to require additional preparation and outside assistance to ensure adequate survey engagement by institutional research and administrative personnel. This BoF, which is designed to kick off a series of EPSCoR-focused engagement events that will culminate in a full PEARC21 workshop, brings together RCD survey authors and research technology support personnel from NSF-EPSCoR institutions to review ongoing challenges, discuss current survey efforts, and provide feedback to the Model development process. Non-EPSCoR institutions with interest in the survey are welcome to participate.

The Cyberteam Portal was developed to support the management of project workflows and capture project results for a suite of over 40 projects launched as part of the Northeast Cyberteam Initiative, an NSF-sponsored program that aims to make regional and national cyberinfrastructure more readily accessible to researchers in small and mid-sized institutions. The portal performs four principal functions: manage project workflows and capture project results; manage cyberteam participants; match students and mentors with projects; and provide a front door to self-service training/learning resources The portal was developed with an eye toward making it possible for other Cyberteam programs to adopt it without incurring significant cost, while maintaining their own identity and project workflows. The Great Plains CyberTeam, Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC), SouthWest Expertise in Expanding, Training, Education and Research (SWEETER), and Kentucky Cyberteam programs have started exploring the use of the platform as a management tool for their related programs in a pilot program. We share our preliminary results at this BoF session and invite discussion and additional participation.