Our Terminology

National cyberinfrastructure (CI) initiatives have been around over three decades, and a significant amount of jargon and acronyms have accrued over the years. Here we clarify some of the terms and acronyms you may find throughout your experience with ACCESS. We encourage recommendations for edits or inclusions; please send any and all suggestions through our feedback form. 

• AARC - ACCESS Allocations Review Committee

  • See Reviewers and Get Involved with ACCESS

• Accelerate ACCESS - One of the four allocation project types 

  • See Comparison Table and Preparing Your Accelerate ACCESS Request

• ACCESS - Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Support & Services

  • See ACCESS Homepage, About ACCESS, and Get Started

• Action - Options that researchers have to manage their allocations

  • See Use Credits: Overview and Manage My Projects (note: please check that this is correct, I don’t have anything on the “manage my project” page - SF)

• Allocation - A set amount of units on a resource

  • More information on About Allocation page

• AMIE - Account Management Information Exchange, a communications protocol

  • (Note: I can’t find a good page about this - SF)

• API - Application Programming Interface

  • See Operations API and ACCESS Operations API

• Campus Champions - Longstanding group who assist local researchers to leverage CI

  • See About, Campus Champions Homepage, Affinity Groups, and ACCESS Campus Champion Example Allocation 

• CI - Cyberinfrastructure

  • See Building Cyberinfrastructure for Everyone

• Credits - ACCESS credits; universal currency that can be exchanged for resource units“Digital Ecosystem” page on Wikipedia

  • See Use Credits: Overview

• DevOps - Software Development and Operations

  • For more detailed definition, see “DevOps” Wikipedia page (Note: I could not find a really relevant page on the ACCESS website - SF)

• Ecosystem - Connecting processes; delineating boundaries between NSF programs

  • See Acknowledging ACCESS; for a more detailed definition see “Digital Ecosystem” Wikipedia page (Note: I could not find a really relevant source for this item on the ACCESS website - SF)

• Exchange - The action of requesting a conversion of ACCESS Credits to resource units

  • See Managing Allocations: Overview, Use Credits: Overview, Manage My Projects, and Exchange Calculator (Note: please check that the “Manage My Projects” page is correct, I don’t have anything on that page - SF)

• Extension - A modification to the end date of an allocation

  • See Managing Allocations: Overview and Prepare Requests: Overview

• Gateway - Community-developed integrated set of tools, applications, and data

  • See Science Gateways

• Innovative Pilot - A solicitation requirement to enhance the future of allocations

  • See About Allocations, Organization, and ACCESS: Advancing Innovation (Note: these pages are the best I could find - SF)

• Job - A unit of work or execution on a computing platform 

  • See What Gets Measured Gets Improved (Note: this page is the best I could find - SF)

• Marketplace - Where researchers and resource providers interact

  • See Use Credits: Overview and Researchers and Educators

• Metrics - ACCESS awardee for Monitoring and Measuring Services

  • See Metrics: More Than Numbers, ACCESS Monitoring and Measurement, and Metrics Archives

• On-ramps - One of the Innovative Pilots under Allocations

  • See About Allocations, ACCESS: Advancing Innovation, and ACCESS: Ramps (PDF p.7, “On-Ramps” slide) (Note: these pages are the best I could find - SF)

• Opportunity - See “Project Type” 

  • See ACCESS Allocations Opportunities and Prepare Requests: Overview

• ORCiD - Code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication

  • See About XRAS Software, ORCiD Homepage, and "ORCiD" Wikipedia page

• Project Type - A specific level of allocation; also referred to as “Opportunity” 

  • See Prepare Requests: Overview and Comparison Table

• Proposal - A composed written request for an ACCESS allocation

  • See Prepare Requests: Overview, and “Prepare Request” pages for each individual project type: Explore, Discover, Accelerate, and Maximize

• Resource Provider (RP) - Representatives and operators of services and hardware 

  • See Resource Providers 

• Reviewers - Those who provide their expertise and guidance on allocation proposals

  • See ACCESS Allocations, Review Criteria, and Reviewers 

• Supplement - A request action for additional credits or resource units

  • See Managing Allocations: Overview and RAMPS/Policies FAQs

• Support - ACCESS awardee for End User Support Services

  • See ACCESS Support

• Ticket - A formal help support request 

  • See Open a Ticket and ACCESS Ticket System

• Transfer - A request action to move resource units to another target resource

  • See RAMPS/Policies FAQs, Managing Allocations: Overview, and ACCESS Allocations Policies

• UI - User Interface

  • See About XRAS Software, Tools, and “User Interface” Wikipedia page (Note: there is not any really relevant source for this item on the ACCESS website - SF)

• Usage - Reporting of resource unit consumption 

  • See Allocations Usage (Note: please check because I can’t see this page - SF), XDMoD, What Gets Measured Gets Improved, Metrics—More Than Numbers, and ACCESS Allocations Map (click on “Usage”)

• Variable Marketplace - One of the Innovative Pilots under Allocations

  • See ACCESS: Advancing Innovation and ACCESS: RAMPS slide deck (PDF p.7 “1. Variable Marketplace”) (Note: these pages are the best I could find - SF)

• XDMoD - A tool developed by ACCESS Metrics to monitor resource performance

  • See XDMoD

• XRAS - eXtensible Resource Allocation Service

  • See About XRAS Software

• XSEDE - eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, the predecessor to ACCESS

See XSEDE Services Being Retired on 8/31, XSEDE Archives, and Advancing to ACCESS; for more information on how to make a transition from XSEDE to ACCESS, see Acknowledging ACCESS, Researchers and Educators, and Managing Allocations: Overview