ACCESS Staff Newsletter – April 2023

Inside ACCESS is a monthly newsletter produced for all ACCESS program staff. It contains program-wide announcements and updates from each of the program's service areas. Questions/comments? Email us at communications@access-ci.org.

Allocations Updates

The ACCESS Allocations team completed their annual NSF review on April 14. One of the topics that resulted in a lot of discussion surrounded the “Variable Marketplace” Innovative Pilot for Allocations. The Variable Marketplace will allow ACCESS Resource Providers to modify ACCESS Credit exchange rates for the resources they make available. Factors such as changes in supply and demand, promoting green computing initiatives to offer discounts during times of day when energy costs are lower, or discounts for specific research applications or institutions could all influence a resource’s exchange rate. This Innovative Pilot is scheduled to start development in the coming months, thanks to valuable input received from partners at Indiana University (Jetstream2), the University of Pittsburgh Center for Research Computing, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (Bridges-2) and Texas Advanced Computing Center. With the continuing collection of optional demographic information within ACCESS profiles, some productive discussions took place regarding how the program could set baselines for a democratization index to measure the impacts of program initiatives.

Researcher Satisfaction Survey

The Allocations team recently presented results from our annual community survey that seeks feedback on the ACCESS Allocations process and software. These results allow us to prioritize future work, new features, and process changes. The survey was sent to all individuals who interacted with the Allocations web infrastructure prior to December 31, 2022. Overall, respondents were highly satisfied with the outcome of their allocation request (50% Extremely Satisfied, 36% Satisfied) and the usefulness of reviewer comments (19% Extremely Satisfied, 35% Satisfied). Most respondents were satisfied with the allocation policies (36% Extremely Satisfied, 44% Satisfied), as well as the allocations process (38% Extremely Satisfied, 43% Satisfied), and documentation (29% Extremely Satisfied, 48% Satisfied). Respondents' free-text comments showed high satisfaction with ACCESS services, and many respondents expressed appreciation for the staff's responsiveness and helpfulness.

Support Updates

The ACCESS Support team participated in their annual review in mid-April with several members of the community. This review is fundamental to providing feedback and input on the progress of our project. Our team prepared several presentations that highlighted how far we have come with our Support services in this first year of the project. We are very proud of the accomplishments we have made in Year 1 and have generated plans for Year 2. More information will come as plans are solidified and developed.

The Pegasus workflow management capability is now enabled as a pilot offering from the ACCESS Support team. The goal is to provide an easy-to-use workflow environment that can support the submission of high-throughput workflows across ACCESS resources (all from a single user-facing capability built on top of Open OnDemand). Users can use the Jupyter Notebooks to create and run their workflows. A dynamic pilot job provisioning tool, HTCondor Annex, is integrated to provision ACCESS resources.

ACCESS Pegasus also has a set of hosted pre-configured sample workflows for users to try out. This capability is currently configured for selected ACCESS resources (PSC's Bridges-2, Purdue's Anvil, SDSC's Expanse, and TACC’s Stampede2). We're working on expanding our coverage and will connect and work with Resource Providers as we move forward. Please contact us via the ticket system if you'd like more information or to provide feedback. ACCESS Support is eager to hear from you!

Operations Updates

ACCESS Operations has been busy this month preparing our PY1 annual report and prepping for our annual review, which was held on April 20-21. The review went very well, with the team receiving high praise from the panel about the amount of work that has been accomplished thus far and the goals we've set for the coming year.

In addition, the Student Training & Engagement Program (STEP) team has been working very hard to finalize plans for the two-week, in-person STEP-1 training that will take place in Miami at Florida International University (FIU) May 15-26. We have a great cohort of 15 students who will be participating, and many people are working hard behind the scenes on logistics and content planning to ensure the students have a great experience! Soon after STEP-1, six of the students will travel to Urbana, IL for a full-time summer internship experience. Highlights of these programs will be shared more broadly as they're available!

The migration to Jira Service Management as our ticketing system platform is complete with JSM up and running. The RT system continues to be available in read-only format for a short time.

Finally, a new, improved version two of the integration roadmaps was released. The roadmaps team is turning its attention to other roadmaps including those for unallocated resources.

ACO Updates

Like all the ACCESS Service teams, the ACO has been preparing for and participating in the program's Annual NSF Panel Review. We appreciate the opportunity to present our successes and have meaningful conversations with experts in our field that will inform our activities for PY2.

Additionally, the ACO has helped with coordinating the ACCESS in-person meeting planned for June 26-27 in Boulder. The meeting will have both plenary and parallel sessions and is an excellent chance for those attending to continue building relationships and plans for the coming year.

Follow ACCESS on LinkedIn!

ACO has recently launched a LinkedIn page for ACCESS. This social channel will provide another method for delivering important information and updates to our audiences and will be integrated into our social media strategy. Give us a follow at https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessforci/ (you must be signed in to LinkedIn to view the page).

ACCESS is supported by the National Science Foundation.