| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 19, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | May 4, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 1548562 |
| Award Instrument: | Cooperative Agreement |
| Program Manager: |
Robert Chadduck
rchadduc@nsf.gov (703)292-2247 OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | August 31, 2023 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $110,000,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $131,836,768.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2017 = $54,657,704.00 FY 2018 = $5,974,676.00 FY 2019 = $11,682,081.00 FY 2020 = $21,836,772.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
506 S WRIGHT ST URBANA IL US 61801-3620 (217)333-2187 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
IL US 61820-6235 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | XD-Extreme Digital |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
This award supports the continuation and evolution of NSF project 1053575 - XSEDE: eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment. The goal of XSEDE is to accelerate open scientific discovery by enhancing the productivity and capability of researchers, engineers, and scholars, and by broadening their participation in science and engineering. It does so by making advanced computational resources easier to use, integrating existing resources into new, powerful services and building the community of users and providers. XSEDE is a virtual organization that provisions complex distributed infrastructure, support services, and technical expertise. A prominent opportunity for XSEDE is the growing, diverse collection of advanced computing, high-end visualization, data analysis, and other resources and services available to researchers, engineers, and scholars; these resources have the potential to help understand and solve the most important and challenging problems facing the nation and world. The challenge for XSEDE, as a virtual organization, is to organize these disparate resources, creating integrated services and a coordinated environment that serves the end user needs. The challenge also includes fostering awareness of, and training for, full utilization of the capabilities offered by XSEDE and its associated resources, as well as catalyzing workforce developments. All these tasks need to be accomplished in light of evolving user requirements, resources, and NSF strategies.
The XSEDE 2 project will be executed by the principal investigator (PI) and staff of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and by the co-PIs and staff of the partner organizations at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh), San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC, University of California San Diego), and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC, University of Texas at Austin), as well as 15 other partner organizations.
For the next five years, in pursuit of its overall goals of enhancing user productivity and broadening participation of the CDS&E community, XSEDE 2 will provide an adaptive and streamlined framework that anticipates the opportunities afforded by advances in technology, responds to users' abilities to make effective use of new capabilities, and enables the current and next generation in using these technologies to advance their fields. The three strategic goals remain unchanged from the original XSEDE project:
* To deepen and extend use of the ecosystem of national cyberinfrastructure (CI) by both existing computational researchers and new communities of scientists and students where the use of computation and large-scale data is transforming their respective fields;
* To advance the national CI ecosystem by creating an open and evolving infrastructure, and by enhancing the array of technical expertise and support services offered; and
* To sustain the national CI ecosystem by maintaining a secure, reliable and efficient infrastructure.
XSEDE 2 will reorganize into five goal-driven focus areas that will provide a more agile and responsive program designed to accelerate progress toward the strategic goals:
* The Resource Allocation Service (RAS), led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and four other partners, will continue to manage the process of receiving, evaluating and awarding proposals for computational resources. In doing so, it will fulfill XSEDE 2's crucial role of neutral arbiter in allocating resources from the service-provider ecosystem to the research community. RAS will also identify new opportunities for allocation innovations by increased transparency, open reporting of user trends, and adapting the allocation process to new technologies.
* The revised XSEDE Community Infrastructure (XCI) service, led by Cornell University and six other partners, will identify, evaluate, test, and make available new software capabilities. Governance is in place to ensure that these activities are driven by the needs of both users and providers of cyberinfrastructure.
* Community Engagement & Enrichment (CEE), led by the University of Texas and 12 other partners, will build on the XSEDE tradition of outstanding user services, and engage a new generation of diverse computational researchers. In addition to education, training, and outreach activities, CEE will connect to campus HPC communities, to help researchers access both local and national resources.
* The Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS), led by the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and eight other partners, will maximize the effectiveness of HPC resources through its large staff of computational experts who will directly participate in research teams, providing advanced assistance to science projects.
* Finally, XSEDE Operations, led by the University of Tennessee and five other partners, will maintain and evolve an integrated HPC capability of national scale. Operations provides a "one-stop-shop" experience for users across the XSEDE-coordinated HPC ecosystem.
While continuity in providing these services is essential for the large and further-growing user community, XSEDE 2 will also respond to the evolving needs and opportunities of science and technology. To this end, XSEDE 2 will develop novel ways to connect to and collaborate with other national, regional and campus cyberinfrastructure organizations. The project will continue to innovate the use of "e-science portals" (also known as Science Gateways). Science gateways provide interfaces and services that are customized to a domain science and have an increasing role with facilities and research centers, collaborating on large research undertakings (e.g., Advanced LIGO, Polar Geospatial Center). This approach facilitates broad community access to advanced compute and data resources. Science gateways are now serving more than 50% of the user community. XSEDE 2 will also incorporate new methods to serve users interested in cloud computing resources and big-data projects. Furthermore, by analyzing trends in usage and technology, the renewal project will be even better positioned to respond to the evolving needs of its stakeholders and to emerging opportunities in new compute and data resources.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE 2,0) was well established as the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world. The XSEDE 2.0 project integrated and coordinated advanced digital services within the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem to support contemporary science. This ecosystem involved a highly distributed, yet integrated and coordinated, assemblage of software, supercomputers, visualization systems, storage systems, networks, portals and gateways, collections of data, instruments, and personnel with specific expertise. XSEDE provided a long-term platform to empower modern science and engineering research and education. As a significant contributor to the broader ecosystem, driven by the needs of the open research community, XSEDE substantially enhanced the productivity of a growing community of scholars, researchers, and engineers. XSEDE federated with other high-end facilities and with campus-based resources, serving as the foundation for a national e-science infrastructure with tremendous potential for enabling new advancements in research and education.
XSEDE?s efforts under the XSEDE 2.0 award were guided by clear statements of its vision, mission, and strategic goals. That vision was of a world of digitally enabled scholars, researchers, and engineers participating in multidisciplinary collaborations while seamlessly accessing computing resources and sharing data to tackle society?s grand challenges. More pointedly, research now requires more than just supercomputers, and XSEDE represented a step toward a more comprehensive and cohesive set of advanced digital services through its mission: to substantially enhance the productivity of a growing community of scholars, researchers, and engineers through access to advanced digital services that support open research; and to coordinate and add significant value to the leading cyberinfrastructure resources funded by the NSF and other agencies.
By the end of the funding period, quarterly XSEDE was supporting nearly 4,000 researchers and students. During the six-year period XSEDE supported well over $3.6 billion of funded research, primarily from the federal sponsors including the NSF, the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). XSEDE represented a significant research support infrastructure in the U.S. and interruptions in the provisioning and support of this infrastructure would significantly disrupt the progress of science. As part of its mission, XSEDE has supported many successes in the broader community and XSEDE has worked to evolve as the needs of the community have evolved:
- During the period of XSEDE 2.0, over $3.6 billion (September 2016-May 2021, data unavailable past May 2021) in funded research projects had allocations on XSEDE resources to support their activities.
- XSEDE supported over 16,000 publications collected during this program period.
- The community of active users grew from 2,900 users per quarter at the start of Program Year 1 (PY1) to nearly 4,000 users per quarter in PY6.
- The growth in size of the community was complemented by a greater diversity of domains and disciplines supported. Researchers from computational finance, machine learning, textual analysis, phylogeny, genomics, archaeology, and digital humanities began to use the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem with the support of XSEDE.
- XSEDE also expanded the demographic and geographic diversity of the community making use of the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. Researchers with allocations resided in all 50 states and all U.S. possessions. The growth of participation by under-represented communities was dramatic.
- The community of users of the XSEDE User Portal (XUP) grew from 4,000 to more than 33,700 individuals with XUP accounts, with the number of those logging in each quarter increasing from around 3,000 to more than 6,000. By making use of the XUP as the means of access to all XSEDE services we were able to observe the much broader community of researchers benefitting from XSEDE beyond those with allocations. In particular, XSEDE trained many more individuals than those with allocations, indicating again a broad and broadening impact on the community.
Associated with this support and growth were a number of tangible outputs from the project, fundamental to which was the creation of a coherent infrastructure within the broader cyberinfrastructure, providing an integrated experience in use of the XSEDE-provided resources, services, and support (see XSEDE Project Documents at https://web.archive.org/web/20220819204750/https:/confluence.xsede.org/display/XT/Project+Documentation). The nexus of this success was the XSEDE User Portal (XUP) (no longer accessible), providing a single point of entry. The XUP was complemented by the single sign-on hub, providing a single authentication interface to access all XSEDE-allocated resources. The portal was a rich source of information and support allowing individuals to connect to the resources and services they need to be successful in their research efforts. This included 146 training courses that were listed on the XSEDE User Portal, and a YouTube channel providing 30 still-available lectures to its1,460 subscribers and the broader community.
Last Modified: 08/31/2023
Modified by: John W Towns
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