ACCESS Staff Newsletter – October 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.

 Request Schedule for Maximize Access

Allocations is moving to a semi-annual cycle for Maximize ACCESS requests. The proposal submission windows are:

• Dec. 15, 2023, to Jan. 31, 2024, with awards starting April 1, 2024
• June 15 to July 31, with awards starting October 1, 2024

Researchers with existing large-scale XSEDE Research or earlier Maximize ACCESS allocations should contact the Allocations team through the ACCESS Ticket System with questions or concerns to determine the best option for aligning their project renewals with the semi-annual schedule or with other allocations options.

XDMoD 10.5 Release

A new major version of ACCESS XDMoD was released on July 18 and the corresponding version of Open XDMoD 10.5 was released on Sept. 11. The release notes for the new version are available in the About XDMoD tab for either Open XDMoD or ACCESS XDMoD. Major new features include:

• An improved data analytics framework, which provides programmatic access to the data in the XDMoD database via a Python API. Self-directed tutorials are available for new API users and interactive training sessions were presented at PEARC23. Sessions also are planned for the University of Buffalo booth at the SC23 conference in Denver.
• Support for installation on the Rocky/RHEL 8 operating system
• Enhanced reporting of cloud virtual machine usage.

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 its VM status (active, shelved, etc). In prior versions of XDMoD, the statistics in the cloud realm only included data about active VMs. For further details, see the Open XDMoD website or contact the ACCESS Metrics team via the ACCESS Ticketing System.

Student Interns Assist Operations Team

The ACCESS Operations Student Training and Engagement Program has entered its STEP-3 phase with two students involved in a part-time internship program that will continue through the 2023-2024 academic year. One of the students is embedded with the cybersecurity team assisting with Qualys reorganization, which will better streamline ACCESS vulnerability management. This restructuring also will ensure precise access to resources without the need for global administrative privileges, a feature that will safeguard resources while maintaining seamless accessibility. The other student intern works with the operational support team to improve accessibility to ACCESS resource information for researchers. The work targets the AI chatbot and includes writing programs to generate AI friendly documents from ACCESS database content.

Announcing PEARC24

The PEARC24 Executive Committee is please to announce the tentative dates for PEARC24 to be July 21 - 21, 2024 with the theme "Human Powered Computing." Details on location, conference events and more will be coming soon.

Making it Easier to Get Started

The Branding and Web Presence Working Group, in response to feedback from the field, has updated the access-ci.org homepage with clearer directions to information and helpful "Get Started" links to other areas of the ACCESS web presence. Follow the Get Started link to learn more.

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