Cyberinfrastructure Partnership: About: Coordinated Cross Center Infrastructure

Coordinated Cross-center infrastructure includes coordination activities which will assist users to leverage the facilities and services in both the SDSC and NCSA environments. Coordination provides a tremendous advantage to users but complicates critical issues such as security.

The provision of a secure and robust computing infrastructure is a key requirement for successful, production cyberinfrastructure environment. The challenges in this environment are numerous, and are growing in scale, complexity, and frequency. The traditional .open model. of academic computing calls for easy access to resources and data, and does not respond well to tight controls or restrictive policies.

In such an environment, maintaining a secure computing infrastructure requires vigilance, patience, and an extreme attention to detail. We continue to leverage the local operational and research-based security efforts at the centers to build a collaboration in cyberinfrastructure security targeted to production environments. The goals of the collaboration are to share technology, best practices, and provide a resource for information on security issues to the cyberinfrastructure community.

The aggregate PACI and TeraGrid allocated resources at NCSA and SDSC include more than 40 Tflops of processing power, 1 PB of disk and 8 PB of archival storage, connected by the 30Gbps TG network.

NCSA and SDSC are working together to identify synergies between our facilities to increase our efficiency and improve services to users. Coordinated resource support activities includes:

Efficiencies for common architectures (e.g. Power4, Itanium) including user support, lessons learned, system administration and joint help.
A coordinated Cyberinfrastructure Partnership .Hotpage. providing up-to-date information about both facilities
A uniform trouble ticket system and coordinated help desk services.
A common account management system capable of managing some or all NCSA and SDSC systems from a unified interface, drawing upon the lessons learned by both the centers through the PACI program and TeraGrid.

The User Engagement Team is focused on providing comprehensive and coordinated support to a national community of center users as well as facilitating the development of new user communities. Cross-center user engagement activities include coordinated Strategic Collaborations activities, allocations administration, training, on-line information and documentation, and a joint user survey.

Strategic Applications Collaborations These activities leverage the resources of both centers to provide extensive advanced, high-impact support for a complementary set of applications and associated research groups associated with each center.
Coordinating User-focused Infrastructure Coordination of each center.s user services and infrastructure provides users with a richer resource environment, and more extensive infrastructure to support their applications.
Allocations Administration and Policies The CIP team is working with partners from TeraGrid, SUAC, NUAC, other national communities, and NSF to develop allocations policies and procedures for cyberinfrastructure resources.
Training and Online information and Documentation Training events encourage participation by under-represented individuals, including women, minorities and people with disabilities from majority and minority serving institutions.
User Survey The centers are conducting coordinated annual User Surveys. The combined user survey will be composed of two parts:

Center-specific questions that survey users about specific resources, services and infrastructure: hardware, system policies, networks, filesystems, archival storage, overall quality of site environment and support, etc.
Cross-center questions that survey users about coordinated and non-site-specific activities: integrated software and hardware resources, cross-center policies, allocations, hardware requirements, training, documentation, outreach and educational materials, etc.

The cyberinfrastructure outreach (CIO) team is focused on the development and expansion of the user base for cyberinfrastructure technologies and resources. Particular attention is given to proactively engaging under-represented populations, including women, minorities and people with disabilities from majority and minority serving institutions, as researchers, partners, educators, leaders, and regular users of cyberinfrastructure.