ACCESS Staff Newsletter – July 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.

A Message From Our NSF Program Officer,

Tom Gulbransen

From the program officers' viewpoint, PEARC23 offered a great opportunity to hear from those we serve and to broadcast your latest achievements and plans. We’re thankful for the many achievements and encouraged by the positive feedback heard throughout the week and the well-attended ACCESS sessions. I've also agreed to switch metaphors about the health of our services to the ACCESS ecosystem away from the EMT patient’s vital signs and toward an Olympic athlete achieving VO2 max on a training treadmill.

Thank you for sharing information with the new Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) Director Katie Antypas. We look forward to broadening our successes by engaging new communities and integrating additional programs across the ecosystem.

More On PEARC From ACO Co-PI Shawn Strande

Many of you had the good fortune of attending PEARC this past month and experienced firsthand a terrific line-up of technical sessions, Birds-of-a-Feather, plenaries, poster sessions, networking events and vendor exhibits. PEARC was held at the Portland Convention Center, which provided a wonderful environment to network with colleagues and share what they’ve been doing over the last year. From my perspective, the logistics, quality of the program and venue made it perhaps the best PEARC yet. The PEARC Committee, which included Co-chairs Shelley Knuth and Alana Romanella from the ACCESS Support team, set a high bar. A shout-out to Allocations team member Ken Hackworth, as well, who was Co-chair for the Technical Committee. Finally, the ACCESS table was right in the middle of the program break area and got a lot of visitors who wanted to learn more about the program. Thanks to the Communications team for their work in making that happen.

For the ACCESS project, it was an especially gratifying conference. From tutorials to BoFs and everything in between, it was a great opportunity to share work, get feedback from the community, and connect with collaborators and users we rarely see face-to-face. Wednesday’s Plenary featured an NSF panel that kicked off the new OAC Director Katie Antypas sharing some initial thoughts about her new role, highlighting, in particular, the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) initiative. Our program officer Tom Gulbransen participated, briefing the community on ACCESS and reminding people about the new CITAP solicitation that’s out now and will eventually become part of the ACCESS ecosystem.

Beyond the formal program, the ACCESS project team took advantage of being together to hold both program-wide and External Advisory Board meetings. Both were held as hybrid events and were great opportunities to update one another and get input on DEI plans, program-wide goals and share feedback heard from PEARC attendees about ACCESS. As a bonus, Katie Antypas spent time at the program-wide meeting, reiterating the importance of ACCESS to the community, but mostly just listening and learning about the program.

If you weren’t able to attend and would like to get more details, please reach out to your colleagues who did and keep an eye out for information on follow-ups out of the conference.

Operations Updates

STEP Summer Internships Wrap Up

The ACCESS Operations Student Training & Engagement Program (STEP) summer internship program has come to an end. Six students participated in a full-time internship during June and July and delivered final presentations about their various projects to Operations leadership this week.

Four of the students participated in the student program at PEARC23. Final papers are being published in the Operations document repository and will be publicly available soon. Two of the students will be selected to continue on to STEP-3, a part-time internship during the upcoming academic year.

ACO Updates

ACCESS Materials For Upcoming Events

If you're exhibiting and representing ACCESS at an upcoming event, the ACO now offers branded items to support you. Find out how to order a tablecloth and/or pull-up banners here.

You can also order brochures and swag for your booth – or to have with you if you're just attending – here.

Finally, if you attend a conference on behalf of ACCESS in any capacity, please enter the details here so we can properly report our community engagement activities across the program.

Metrics Updates

New XDMoD Data Analytics Framework

The new XDMoD Data Analytics Framework is available, providing programmatic access to the data in ACCESS XDMoD via a Python API and opening up analysis of the data to a broad range of data science and machine learning tools.

The ACCESS Monitoring and Measurement Service (MMS) team presented a tutorial at the PEARC23 conference in July showing how to use the new Data Analytics Framework. Participants walked through example Jupyter Notebooks that are designed for self-guided instruction and are available through the xdmod-notebooks GitHub repository. Anyone with an ACCESS account can log in to ACCESS XDMoD, create an API token as instructed in the notebooks and use that token with the Python API to obtain and analyze data from ACCESS XDMoD.

The ACCESS MMS team welcomes contributions to the collection of Jupyter Notebooks and the Python API source code. Contributions can be made via GitHub Pull Requests. For further information about XDMoD or the Data Analytics Framework, or to schedule a training session, please contact the ACCESS MMS team via the ACCESS Ticket System.

Enhanced XDMoD Coverage Of Cloud Virtual Machines

The XDMoD cloud realm now includes non-active virtual machines (VMs) in its statistics and a “VM State” dimension that allows grouping of data by the VM status (Active, Shelved, etc). In prior versions of XDMoD, the statistics in the cloud realm only included data about VMs when they were active.

XDMoD will now also include data about VMs when they're not active; i.e., when they're paused, stopped, shelved, etc. For example, the Core Hours statistic only counted the time when a VM was turned on. That statistic, along with others, will now include data when a VM is turned off or shelved, and the new VM State dimension will allow users to see data for a statistic broken down by the state of a VM, with the state being Active, Inactive or Shelved. After these changes, in order to see the same data as before, you should look at the Active value in the VM State dimension.

ACCESS is supported by the National Science Foundation.