November 2024

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

In this Issue

DeltaAI Allocations Now Available Via ACCESS
December Quarterly Meeting
Maximize ACCESS Submissions Window Opening
STEP Applications Now Being Accepted
Monitoring Service Now Available
Spotlight: Sage Edge Computing Platform

Opportunities

Events & Trainings

Community Announcements

What's New?

DeltaAI Allocations Now Available Via ACCESS

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has launched DeltaAI, an advanced AI computing and data resource, allocable through ACCESS, that will be a companion system to NCSA’s Delta. Funded by nearly $30 million in awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and also accessible to researchers across the country through the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot, DeltaAI enables scientists and researchers to address the world’s most challenging problems by accelerating complex AI, machine learning and high-performance computing applications running terabytes of data by using state-of-the-art hardware, including the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip.

December Quarterly Meeting

Staff should have received a calendar hold for Dec. 9 and 10 for our next virtual Quarterly Meeting. Visit the wiki for more details – we will continue to update it before the meeting.

Visit the staff wiki

Maximize ACCESS Proposal Submission Window Opening Soon

The next window for submitting Maximize ACCESS proposals will open on Thursday, Dec. 12 and close on Friday, Jan. 31, 2025. Awards will start April 1, 2025. From the Maximize ACCESS opportunity that closed in September, the Allocations Team awarded nearly 1.6 billion CPU hours and more than 4 million GPU hours to 90 projects. The average project received 90% of the resources requested, and the current portfolio of ACCESS-allocated resources has room to award even more time to meritorious proposals. Information on preparing a successful Maximize ACCESS proposal can be found on the Allocations website. You can also learn more at upcoming training webinars at 2 p.m. ET on Thursday, Dec. 12 and Tuesday, Jan. 21. After this proposal submission period ends, the next submission window will be June 15 – July 31, 2025, with awards starting in October 2025.

How to prepare Maximize ACCESS requests

Submit Maximize ACCESS requests

STEP Applications Now Being Accepted

Applications for the 2025 Student Training and Engagement Program (STEP) cohort will be accepted through Feb. 15, 2025. Please help us spread the word! Students can visit the STEP website to learn more and apply.

Learn more about STEP

Monitoring Service Now Available

An ACCESS Operations-supported Nagios monitoring service is now available to monitor all ACCESS affiliated infrastructure, including RP resources and related services and services provided by ACCESS projects. The monitoring service can notify on test failures through emails and post to ACCESS associated Slack channels.

View more information about this service

Spotlights & Shout Outs

Sage Edge Computing Platform Enables "AI at the Edge for Science"

The Sage Edge Computing Platform is no ordinary CPU, GPU or storage resource, but a unique platform, a “new kind of national-scale cyberinfrastructure to enable AI at the edge for science.” The ACCESS community can learn more about Sage in the ACCESS Resource Catalog under “Northwestern U Sage Edge Computing Platform.” Sage is a distributed, intelligent sensor network that enables researchers to explore AI techniques to better understand natural and built environments. Throughout vast areas that span the U.S. and beyond, more than 100 Sage nodes with instruments such as cameras, microphones, and weather sensors directly connected to programmable AI-enabled computers can quickly analyze large data streams. Sage applies machine-learning algorithms to the data from these intelligent sensors, and then builds reusable software to run programs within the embedded computer. It then transmits the results over the network to central computer servers. Access to specific Sage nodes, as well as protected image and audio data for model training, is available subject to signing a data use agreement. Pictured is a portion of the NSF-funded Sage testbed at Argonne National Laboratory.

Visit the Sage website

Learn about Sage allocations through ACCESS

Where in the World is ACCESS?

ACCESS Makes Its Mark at SC24

ACCESS leaders and team members, along with many ACCESS Resource Providers, were in Atlanta last week for the annual conference of high-performance computing (SC24), which brings together the global HPC community. ACCESS was recognized in the HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards for "Best Use Of AI Methods for Augmenting HPC Applications" and showcased a wide range of science enabled by ACCESS systems.

At left, ACCESS Coordination Office PI John Towns talks about the ACCESS mission with Jeniece Wnorowski and TechArena.

HPC WIre Readers' and Editors' Choice Award Winners