Partnerships with National Impact

If you’ve been following news about the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), you probably know a lot about the Center’s many high-performance computing (HPC) services and resources. And although NCSA is located on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, the Center is actually part of a national network of HPC resources available to any U.S.-based researcher or educator. The U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS program provides thousands of participants with resources and assistance each year – at no cost to them – and NCSA is proud to be a resource provider for the program.

NCSA has consistently recognized the importance of supporting and guiding future leaders and experts in the HPC domain. The Center hosts several student-centered programs, helping students learn what it means to be a part of a research team utilizing compute and data storage resources. ACCESS has similar student programs that are aligned with these goals, and NCSA has hosted and mentored a number of student interns in the ACCESS STEP program over the years.

STEP is as close as it gets to a formal cyberinfrastructure (CI) training program – it’s especially unique in that it provides highly practical experiences. Students are embedded with teams working at premier computing centers across the country. Each student is given the opportunity to learn more about the various specialties within the field of cyberinfrastructure, and they’re paired with mentors with decades of experience who take them through the day-to-day of the experts who support HPC.

Abrar Hossain, a student studying computer science at the University of Toledo, is currently embedded with the Networking and Data Transfer Services (NDTS) team at NCSA and the Center for Internet Augmented Research and Assessment (CIARA) at Florida International University.

“I’m working on a project developing a Python-based counters parser for eBPF maps that logs byte and packet counts of VLANs and ports every 100ms; part of a larger microburst detection system,” he said. In the short time he’s been at NCSA, he’s already learning new things from his experience. “I was surprised by the depth of real-time telemetry you can extract using eBPF and how configurable and powerful the tooling around it is.”

Al Lizaso is studying cyber operations and resilience along with computer science at Boise State University. She’s working with the U. of I. Security Operations Analyst team while at NCSA. “I started off with a project checking a list of service principals to see if they’re active,” she said. “This gave me hands-on experience with tools like Qualys, Elasticsearch/Kibana, and nslookup. I’m looking forward to learning more about Puppet and Ansible throughout the rest of my internship!”

My internship experience so far inspired me to change my major from computer science to BSU’s Cyber Operations and Resilience program. The CORe courses are much more relevant to the work I’m doing here with NCSA and my career goals after graduation. I was a bit surprised at how quickly this program influenced my decision to change my major.

–Al Lizaso, STEP intern

Over the years, NCSA has provided researchers with robust hardware and software solutions to their research computing needs, many of those available through the ACCESS program and its predecessors. The Delta supercomputer was the first NCSA resource available through the ACCESS program, and DeltaAI was introduced just last year as a new supercomputer ideal for AI research. Both quickly became the most requested resources for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) research in the ACCESS portfolio. The strength of these two machines in the AI/ML domain has also made them key resources in the NAIRR Pilot, another NSF-funded program that specializes in AI research on a national level.

DeltaAI, the Center’s newest supercomputer, entered the Top500 list at number 89, an impressive feat considering that this is a list of supercomputers worldwide, including those serviced by private industry. Delta is a couple of years older, but as with many of the Center’s systems, our specialists continually monitor the system and make improvements. Delta’s new NVIDIA H200 GPUs are the largest-memory GPU resources currently available to NSF researchers, making the system a highly relevant resource for researchers even as it approaches its fourth year of operation.

The Center also provides large storage options for researchers through Granite, a large tape archive. With a total capacity of over 170PB of accessible and replicated data, NCSA makes 3.6PB available for allocations through ACCESS.

A program of the size and scale of ACCESS needs strong leadership to deliver the highest-quality experience for researchers and educators looking for HPC resources. NCSA offers support and expert solutions through the ACCESS program, and many of the leadership positions within ACCESS are filled with some of the Center’s most knowledgeable HPC professionals.

John Towns, NCSA’s Deputy Director, is the principal investigator (PI) of the ACCESS Coordination Office. He oversees many of the administrative aspects of the ACCESS program, including coordinating communication efforts to reach new audiences, maintaining the public-facing ACCESS website and coordinating community-building activities.

Tim Boerner, NCSA’s associate director of integrated cyberinfrastructure, is the ACCESS Operations PI. He leads team efforts involving operational support, data and networking, and cybersecurity. Laura Herriott, NCSA’s associate director of research consulting, is an ACCESS Allocations co-PI. Herriott helps lead a team that keeps the allocations process running smoothly, so researchers and educators spend minimal time waiting for their approval to get onto a system. ACCESS allocations has a very impressive average turnaround time from application to using a resource – research projects typically only take nine days from the time someone applies for an allocation to using a supercomputer like DeltaAI.

Along with strong leadership, NCSA provides expertise and support throughout the ACCESS program, whether it’s technical support to help get users onto an unfamiliar system or communication support to help spread the word about the important research enabled by the program. From leadership to technical support, NCSA experts are part of every aspect of the ACCESS program.

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ABOUT ACCESS

The Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program is a U.S. National Science Foundation-funded virtual organization that facilitates cyberinfrastructure (CI) support for research. Through ACCESS, researchers can request time allocated from an extensive network of CI resources such as advanced computing, data resources and analysis, visualization and storage. The ACCESS CI ecosystem is essential to computational and data-intensive research with a goal of providing seamless collaboration between resources and researchers.