ACO Updates

ACCESS NSF Leadership Change

Our NSF Cognizant Program Officer, Tom Gulbransen, is transitioning to other responsibilities within NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure after two years of leadership. While Tom remains involved, Sharon Geva, who has supported him, has stepped into the role of Cognizant Program Officer. Tom has been a driving force in the ACCESS program and has provided excellent support and guidance to the program, bringing his experience from other large programs in which he has been involved. On behalf of all ACCESS staff, we thank Tom for his leadership and look forward to working with Sharon as ACCESS enters its third year.

ACCESS Teams Converge for Meetings

Last month, the ACCESS Quarterly Meeting and the External Advisory Board meetings took place in Chicago. These are important meetings for the project, providing an opportunity to celebrate accomplishments, look ahead and share plans for the coming year, brainstorm about new approaches, and connect with teammates.

The External Advisory Board meeting took place on the first day, with presentations from each team on accomplishments and plans for the coming year and discussions on external communications, outreach and metrics. Individual meetings between the EAB and Support and Metric groups were an opportunity to take deeper dives into areas of special interest to the teams. The EAB once again demonstrated its commitment and passion for helping ACCESS achieve its goals by providing expert feedback and advice to the project. 

The formal Quarterly Meeting started off on the second day, with over 40 people attending in person and many others joining remotely. The day kicked off with a facilitated team building session led by Dr. AJ Lauer of Thriving Ibis, a small, woman-owned business with expertise in CI, team building, DEI, community engagement and other areas. The session was an important refresher that reminded us that how we work together is as important as what we work on and that while there is much to celebrate in our collective achievements, there are still many who have yet to benefit from the resources and expertise of ACCESS and other NSF investments.

The majority of the Quarterly Meeting comprised sessions on external communication, outreach, ongoing development projects, working groups and other topics.

EAB and Quarterly meeting agendas and materials are available on the ACCESS Wiki.

Allocations Updates

A Year of Hard Work Results in Redesigned ACCESS Allocations Website 

Allocations has a new website! Check it out if you haven’t already. Early feedback has been incredible – people love it! 

Based on feedback from the community the Allocations team revised interfaces to highlight important information for various audiences. Check out some of the new features below:

• Take a video tour on our How-To page and learn how to easily manage your project.
• See what other researchers are working on at the Current ACCESS Projects page. This page provides a list of all projects, searchable by scientific field, organization and project type. 
• If you have an existing project, you now have a projects headquarters called My Projects. It’s the go-to location for all project management tasks, including adding or tweaking resources, managing people, tracking project history and more.
• It’s never been easier to get started with the Get Your First Project page. Here you will find the steps to get set up and be able to see what you’ll need to get started using ACCESS resources. 

Start using the new site now and please feel free to provide your feedback.

Operations Updates

Science Gateway Integration Roadmap Now Available

The ACCESS program is delighted to announce documentation and consultant support for integrating ACCESS allocated Science Gateways into the ACCESS cyberinfrastructure environment. The Science Gateway Integration Roadmap documentation is available through the Operations portal.

This comprehensive documentation provides detailed instructions on how to integrate and operate Science Gateways in ACCESS. It covers a range of tasks, including describing the Science Gateway to enable researcher discovery, requesting ACCESS allocations and community accounts, creating an affinity group where gateway users can interact and reporting which gateway users consumed allocated resources. A Science Gateways integration concierge/consultant is available to assist with the integration process and the integration roadmap documentation.

Anyone with questions or requiring assistance should contact us via the ticketing system.

New ACCESS Resource Provider Software Discovery Interface

The ACCESS program and integrated Resource Providers have introduced the ability to discover software available across the ACCESS environment. With this new capability, new and existing allocated researchers can more easily discover which resources offer the software they need. For allocated researchers, this capability means they can discover all available versions of software they use. They are also provided with instructions on how to access each version of the software from the command line. The new software discovery interface is available here.

For software developers, ACCESS provides two ways to implement software discovery in portals and using other software tools:

• By accessing software information through RESTful APIs (see ACCESS Operations API)
• By embedding our software discovery web app into their portals and websites

To request that a resource provider publish their software, or that they install new software, open a researcher support ticket. To request assistance with the Operations API, the web app or with RP software publishing, open an operations support ticket.

Support Updates

Affinity Groups Are Here For You

Affinity Groups enable people to connect around shared interests and anyone can create one!

Affinity Groups can:

• Provide an easy way to launch a new community 
• Give visibility and enable connections for an existing community
• Offer a space for discussion of a current topic of interest between communities

The support team has unveiled a new feature that provides Affinity Groups with an optional email list for members to communicate directly with each other, enabling easy communication around shared interests. Affinity Groups can provide a community nexus, enabling members to publish and collect important documentation, training, events and announcements. In addition to the member's email list, coordinators can broadcast emails to members of the group. ACCESS Support invites you to explore our Affinity Groups and let us know if there is a new group that would be helpful for your community.

Find out how to join these informative sessions and participate in the ACCESS Pegasus community here .