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

ACCESS Program Announcements

ACCESS at SC22

This is the last reminder for the ACCESS booth volunteer sign-up. If you'll be at SC, we'd greatly appreciate your help staffing the ACCESS booth. Sign up here!

Guide for Developers

There is a guide for developers which provides recommendations for ACCESS staff and resource providers when integrating with ACCESS identity management services. The goal is to provide a uniform and consistent process for users to sign in across ACCESS websites. Check out the guide here.

ACCESS Language Consistency

To keep language clear and consistent, please refer to the various areas of ACCESS by their functions, not “tracks” or other names (i.e. "Allocations" not "Track 1.") We hope that this will eliminate confusion within the community.

ACCESS Logos & Brand Assets

Find ACCESS logos, Powerpoint templates and letterhead here.

Allocations Updates

The allocations team has been busy engaging with the research and resource provider communities in addressing their allocation questions since the transition to ACCESS. The team has also been busy augmenting the existing web presence and functionality of the Allocations software interfaces. The transition from XSEDE to ACCESS required the team to rapidly build tools for allocation management (adding and removing users), project and user queries, and exchanging ACCESS Credits in the allocations marketplace.

What’s next for allocations: Now that the allocations marketplace is live and the xRAS software is operational to receive, review, and administer requests for allocations, the team will be shifting focus starting with an upcoming in-person planning meeting to map out the year ahead, discuss upcoming innovative pilots plans, and to fully operationalize continuous improvement and DEI components of the project.

Support Updates

ACCESS Support continues to refine and improve the Portal (ASP), where users can access: ticket submission, ACCESS OnDemand, ACCESS Pegasus, the Support Knowledge Base, MATCH Plus and MATCH Premier support; news, events, outage reporting and engagements via the Computational Science Support Network (CSSN). In particular, ACCESS Support is growing a suite of knowledge base resources and for the future plans to develop curated content based on analysis and analytics. The research community can also discover and access the Ask.CI Q&A Platform. We look forward to launching the much-anticipated ACCESS CSSN Community Engagement Program Pilot over the next few months. Stay tuned!

Operations Updates

Operations developed and successfully implemented integration roadmaps to assist resource providers and other ACCESS service tracks with their efforts to integrate into the ACCESS ecosystem. In addition, a team of five concierge integration experts was established to assist with integration efforts as needed. An Information Sharing Platform was launched at https://operations.access-ci.org/ to share key information including outages and news from resource providers. The data & networking team established DNS for access-ci.org and will also support access.org once the lease for that domain is acquired. They also worked with Internet2 to transition XSEDEnet to CONECTnet and continued to support Globus file transfer, with documentation and help made available to users for Globus Connect Server 5.4. The cybersecurity team established core Identity and Access Management services for ACCESS, deployed vulnerability management services and established the Cybersecurity Governance Council to approve and disseminate cybersecurity policies for ACCESS.

Metrics Updates

Most ACCESS MMS activities were devoted to effecting the transition from XMS, which supported XSEDE, to establishing ACCESS MMS and supporting the ACCESS launch. These activities included:

writing the ACCESS MMS Project Execution Plan
establishing the ACCESS MMS website
participating in ACCESS committees and working groups
supporting outreach to the CI community
transitioning XDMoD to function within the ACCESS framework

Other activities included:

routine maintenance on XDMoD and Open XDMoD
preliminary work on the data analytics framework, the CI simulator and the ACCESS MMS service model
initial work on tool development for tracking public cloud usage

A critical goal of the transition was to minimize disruption to the CI research community so that researchers were able to seamlessly utilize the CI resources within the ACCESS environment. To demonstrate this, ACCESS MMS leveraged XDMoD to provide a comparison of system usage and job throughput between XSEDE and ACCESS. The analysis included metrics such as number of jobs run, number of service units consumed, breakdowns of usage by resource, by type of user and by field of science. For example, shown below is a plot of the total number of XSEDE and ACCESS HPC users broken down by NSF role. In all cases, there was no measurable difference between CI usage under ACCESS compared to usage under XSEDE. However, our comparsion did note a decrease in Gateway-unique user reporting during the transition, which was subsequently tracked to issues with the gateway API usage for two of the gateways (zhanglab and Cipres) as opposed to an actual decrease in Gateway jobs. This has been corrected, and we're working to recover historical usage where possible.

An XDMoD plot of the total number of XSEDE and ACCESS users using HPC resources (top dataset) and the user breakdown by NSF role.

ACO Updates

The ACCESS Coordination Office has been busy planning for SC22, organizing the ACCESS booth, programs, volunteers and communications. Additionally, the team has been managing the nominations process for the ACCESS External Advisory Board after facilitating the seating of the Executive Council and the establishment of foundational documentation.