Boilerplates

The Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program is a National Science Foundation-funded virtual organization that facilitates cyberinfrastructure (CI) support for research. Through ACCESS, researchers can request time allocated from a large 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 the goal of providing seamless collaboration between resources and researchers.

ACCESS Support provides cost-effective scaled support to the broad scientific community using national cyberinfrastructure. These democratized efforts comprise three major themes: (1) leverage modern information delivery systems to simplify user interfaces; (2) leverage experts from the community to develop training materials and instructions that can dramatically reduce the user learning curve for several increasingly important CI computational techniques; and (3) employ a matchmaking service that will maintain a database of specialist mentors and student mentees that can be matched with projects to provide the domain-specific expertise needed to leverage ACCESS resources.

ACCESS Allocation Services interfaces with the research community to facilitate requests to utilize advanced cyberinfrastructure provided by the NSF. Allocation Services provides an open, inviting, and democratized allocations marketplace to easily request a range of resources to empower all research communities.

ACCESS Operations supports the integration and operation of ACCESS cyberinfrastructure with operational support, networking and data services, and cybersecurity support. We also support the nation’s resource providers and strive to grow the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem by integrating new kinds of resources into the community.

ACCESS Metrics:   The primary goal of Metrics is to monitor the usage and performance of NSF’s suite of supercomputers.  The primary web-based tool to do this is XDMoD which helps center staff run their resources more efficiently, users run their code more efficiently and allows NSF to make data-based decisions on what new systems need to be built and upgraded to support the national research requirements.

The ACCESS Coordination Office fosters an environment of shared governance and horizontal leadership within which program PIs work with a common purpose to create and support an inclusive and vibrant CI ecosystem focused on enabling science.