2023-09-26 ACCESS EC Meeting Agenda & Summary

1. Approval of summaries from prior EC meetings John Towns (5 mins)

   1. 12 September 2023 EC Summary (no changes)
      

2. Program Milestone Check John Towns (15 mins)

   1. Action item for the awardees to update their program milestones

      1. no additional comments or updates

   2. Reminder: Do not edit "Dashboard" tab, please edit "ACCESS program milestones" tab as needed

   3. Expectation to have milestones completed and updated
      

3. Presentation on data related to the NSF AI Institutes and their CI resource needs (15 mins)- Stephen Deems

   1. Data related to AI Institutes needs assessment (2022) In preparation for AI Institutes leadership meeting (SAIL) in late October

      1. 

      2. Link to slides

   2. A survey was sent out to the original 8 institutes but now there ae 25

   3. Purpose is to bring info to the EC and maybe assist the AI institutes in some ways

   4. Bunch of data and reports and resources available to the A institutes which were not available to the initial AI institutes,

   5. Survey focused the questions mentione din Stephen's presentation

   6. In terms of what major resources they use - dept computing resporces, cloud resources, data centers

   7. Set up visaulaization on top of the data and we love more resources,

   8. Concerns about dedicated cloud support either through NSF resources or  like Jetstream

   9. Some AI institutes want to buy more hardware and want some flexible resources

   10. For 7 institutes, they need 2.25 million GPU hours and in terms of storage - 3.25 petabytes but there are currently 25 institutes

   11. A lot of emphasis is on the deadlines of the conferences to ensure resources are available when an award comes in.

   12. Lot of feedback on what allocations processes would be helpful.

   13. Standard SW needs - AI/ML related needs

   14. More CI resources for longer times, dedicated staff,

   15. Expressed need for dedicated personnel like librarians, etc

   16. What are resources available on ACCESS? What changed from Frontera and XSEDE in terms of the allocations process.

   17. There's a month left till the SAIL meeting.

   18. Questions and feedback - don’t know the background, how are they organized? They all similar or different?

       1. Allocations perspective, how will we track them. Multiple institutions, having them fit the current paradigm or have an AI institute opportunity to track them

       2. Mainly leadership. We're going to prod for similar questions

       3. Various teams involved in AI institutes - all of them got funded, but no resources available. there are many AI needs but no resources available.

       4. Stephen trying to figure out the resources available but will have to figure out a way/have conversations at the NSF level
          

4. Planning for December EC&EAB Meeting (15 mins) John Towns

   1. What should be the content for the EC meeting?

   2. Attendees: Apart from the EC, are there any team leads that need to be invited?
      

5. Decision process regarding SC24 presence (15 mins) John Towns

   1. 
      

6. Potential government shutdown (10 mins) John Towns

   1. Is there anything we need to do in preparation?

      
      

7. Informational Items (10 mins)

   1. Allocations Stephen Deems

      1. Researcher Advisory Committee (RAC) meeting scheduled for October 23, 2023

         1. Contact Laura if you have agenda topics you’d like to cover to get researcher feedback and perspectives

      2. ACCESS-wide feedback mechanism

         1. During the virtual quarterly, the outcome of the conversation about allocations feedback was to implement ACCESS-wide feedback through Jira

         2. Shawn would like to loop in the Evaluation working group and will let Laura know if there are any objections

      3. Requests for “Courtesy Reviewers” are being fielded from the Campus Champions

         1. thanks again to Alana for all the support

      4. SGX3 now requestable through Allocations project types

      5. DEI WG invite being sent out by Ag

         1. Meeting this Thursday, September 28 @ 4PM ET

         2. Tough scheduling with CASC next week

      6. Reporters from CNBC reached out to the ACCESS ticket system after seeing the NYTimes piece

         1. Had an initial call about Who, What, Where, When, Why re: ACCESS

         2. They’re interested in startups/small businesses leveraging GPU cards that are increasingly difficult to get a hold of

            1. Hammered-home the notion that this is not our target audience, but they are eligible

      7. Communications team chartering WG

         1. Stephen will be EC Sponsor + Co-chair

            1. May make potential alterations once new Comms person is onboarded

   2. MATCH Shelley Knuth

      1. Support has reps at the CC* and CI/SCIPE meetings

      2. New website launched in two weeks

   3. CONECT Tim Boerner

   4. MMS Tom Furlani

      1. Campus Champions presentation last week was a success - seen uptick in Campus Champions using XDMoD

      2. had two XDMoD outages last week - 2 hours on Monday and Friday am. (multiple different causes).

   5. OpenCI John Towns

      1. ACO mid-year review on Nov 9. Preparations beginning

      2. Preparations for December EAB and Leadership meetings under way

      3. Evaluation Working Group getting under way

      4. Finalizing charter and plan for Community Building & Engagement WG; will need EC Sponsor

      5. Continued prep for SC23

         1. Videos, Highlights book, Comms plan management

      6. Kim Bruch at Grace Hopper this week
         

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