ABSTRACT. The National Science Foundation's vision and investment plans for cyberinfrastructure (CI) are designed to address the evolving science and engineering needs of expanding research communities nationwide. The continued growth in systems speed and scale, and data availability, create exciting opportunities, as well as challenges to inclusive participation. Senior leadership and Program staff from NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) will discuss the most recent funding opportunities across the research CI ecosystem and provide highlights from a portfolio of programs dedicated to enhancing accessibility and usability of systems, as well as fostering inclusive community networks.

ABSTRACT. At its core, High Performance Computing Centers strive to get their users to optimally use their systems to do better science. No matter the institution, scientific discovery is the goal. Getting users to that point can be stressful and time consuming. Centers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year training and educating users on how to write better code and how to effectively and efficiently use their supercomputers to get to that scientific discovery. The question becomes, are the centers utilizing their training and education resources in the best manner possible to help their users achieve those goals? Racing to build the best and fastest machines makes for serious competition between institutes, but should that competition carry over into the training and education realm? Or is there a common good for the users if centers cooperate and collaborate more, with a focused effort getting the users what they need, with the best of intentions, and the best of technologies, utilizing every available medium for engagement and participation. The pandemic has shown that locality is not an issue, training venues have become virtual, maybe it’s time to redefine our individual userbase as a community at large. We would like to discuss what a cooperative and collaborative HPC and Advanced Computing training and education initiative would look like, what would be possible, what could be possible. and how and where would we start? What topics can be cooperated on, what specialties do the individual institutions bring to the table, what up and coming topics should we prepare for, and what does the future of HPC and Advanced Computing education and training look like?

ABSTRACT. The diversity of research that relies on advanced research computing and cyberinfrastructure is rapidly increasing on campuses and at organizations across the nation. Access to reliable, robust, and resilient high-performance computing (HPC) resources is no longer a luxury but an expectation and requirement for the modern researchers in order to stay competitive in their science domain. With the explosion of new advanced technologies offering a variety of processors, accelerators, networking and storage options to power the next generation of HPC resources, researchers are facing added challenges to adapt their codes and workflows to these new and sometimes novel resources. This mismatch often results in decreasing research productivity for users and increasing strain on user support. Frameworks such as Open OnDemand and science gateway frameworks, like Apache Airavata or HubZero, provide an attractive approach to interface with HPC resources that reduce the barriers to accessing the data and computational resources, and more importantly, provide the ability to perform reproducible and shareable computational research. These frameworks aim to serve as Software as a Service (SaaS) and/or Platform as a Service (PaaS). In this Birds of Feather session we will address the emerging questions about how we can design efficient user workflows for the next generation of HPC resources that also tie in to larger ACCESS efforts.

ABSTRACT. ColdFront is an open source resource allocation management system (https://github.com/ubccr/coldfront), designed by the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research (https://buffalo.edu/ccr) to provide a central portal for administration, reporting, and measuring scientific impact of cyberinfrastructure resources. ColdFront, specifically tailored for CI centers, is designed to manage allocations for a diverse set of resources including HPC clusters, co-located departmental and lab servers, software licenses, digital storage, scientific instrumentation, cloud subscriptions, and data access requests. It is designed to complement existing tools, such as Slurm and OpenStack, which manage access to individual hardware and software components. Though every institution will have its own policies for granting access to a resource, how that access gets provided is nearly universal. Through the flexibility of ColdFront’s plug-ins, access policies can be implemented easily to automate the back-end systems resulting in significant cost savings for campuses both small and large. This user group meeting is geared towards existing ColdFront users, those just testing the waters, and anyone interested in hearing more about the project. We'll provide a brief demo, show off new features, and discuss the future road map. We plan to offer ample time for Q&A and discussion amongst the attendees.

ABSTRACT. Overview: The Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator Training and Development (CCIFTD) program is a first-of-its-kind, non-matriculated certification of professional development for CI Facilitators. CCIFTD's role is to attest to proficiency in core skills needed for facilitating computing/data-intensive research, across all Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The emphasis is on crucial professional/interpersonal skills, and complementary CI technical topics. CCIFTD focuses on establishing both (a) the set of skills and (b) a means for determining whether a CI Facilitator has these skills.

Motivation: The CI workforce suffers from a critical deficit of CI Facilitators, the CI professionals who work directly with researchers to advance computing/data-intensive aspects of their research. a vital role at many research institutions. Currently, there is a clear sense of the nature and value of the CI Facilitator role, but no well-defined set of skills agreed upon by the CI Facilitator community at large.

Methodology: 1. Determine the skills that are most valuable for CI Facilitation, by surveying (i) experienced CI Facilitators, (ii) CI organization leaders such as supercomputing center directors, and (iii) STEM researchers who use CI. 2. For each such skill, develop a badge, specifically a training mechanism, an examination instrument, and its scoring rubric, via pilot testing at workshops and online. 3. Construct certification pathways, subsets of badges that collectively merit certification. 4. Test badging methods. 5. Evaluate the CCIFTD program, both formatively during this pilot project and summatively at the end, to improve CCIFTD as it progresses and to determine how successful it has been.

ABSTRACT. The XSEDE Project is planning to hold its annual staff meeting immediately following the PEARC22 conference.