2023-10-23 ACCESS Researcher Advisory Committee - Fall 2023 Mtg.

5 min

Welcome!

Laura Herriott

5 min

Remarks from NSF

Tom Gulbransen

Sharon Geva

10 min

Meeting logistics

• Website: https://access-ci.org/

• Wiki: https://access-ci.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ACP/pages/152371201/ACCESS+Researcher+Advisory+Committee

• Charter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SjIW8FVfDcUCfIVF_CVcO0rnk5DLa_f9daIa2xCUUuE/edit#heading=h.xb90631xffqb

• Naming of a new chair

Laura Herriott

New chair selected: Wladimir Lyra

30 min

ACCESS Operations - Globus: With the the Globus Subscription transition, we’d like to recap the sutuation, decision, and impact of the transition from the ACCESS Globus Subscription to the Resource Provider Subscriptions. With Globus being our recommended data transfer tool, as part of our annual evaluation of data transfer tools, we of would like to hear what RPs have used and what issues they have seen with other tools.

Dave Wheeler

Open

Questions:

• In chat from Tej V Singh - While it makes sense to drop the service, any idea about the service with any new SP members?

  • Researchers can still use the personal free connection through the subscription. Will we be required to have the subscription on our campus?

• Harel - what is it that the users will see compared to what they saw before the August change?

  • Not a lot of differences

• Harel - we teach beginners to be users, when you want to trigger a data transfer, does it look the same today as it did before

  • Might be some different names, but everything else looks the same

• Emre - as a researcher, I want to share my data, what do I need to do?

  • Sean - go to your local person running an endpoint on the dataset and configure your specific directory.

• Emre - So it would be RP specific? ACCESS entry point for data sharing? From the perspective of the novice, how do I share it? Where do I go? What is the pathway to make this easier for the researcher?

  • Dave - work with the RP or submit a support ticket

• Emre - how are researchers aware of this capability built into

  • Some information here: https://operations.access-ci.org/pub/data_n_networking (under Globus)

• Emre - it would be nice to make researchers aware of how to share data

• Tom G - working group storage futures this would be great to share more at that level. Make data

• Shawn - we need a place in the ACCESS documentation about data sharing services. There are other resources out there that offer data migration services and we could pull together a page

• Tom C - NIH research data sharing data management plans and if ACCESS would allow us to do this or if we have to rely entirely on our campus. Especially the experimentalists

  • Dave - starting data set, do compute, transfer, store – the transfer bit, do you have other suggestions

• Tom C - persistent storage would need to be taken into consideration. High assurance transfer data use and data sharing agreements

File transfer options that we should investigate:

• Tom C via chat - HA at A&M or TACC

30 min

ACCESS ACO - Website: Apart from shared navigation, headers, and footers, and some common graphical elements, the ACCESS websites are independently managed by the various service teams. We would like to hear your thoughts about the sites from the standpoint of content, cohesiveness across the teams, where you would recommend improvements.

Shawn Strande

Open

William Lai - is there anyway we could click less on the website? Seems that I have to click very deeply to get to the content ACCESS wide. I understand the UI response is to make more buttons, doesn’t actually address the solution all the time. Getting started (allocations and support).

Brian O’Shea - weirdly difficult to figure out which students have access to which systems, who has used what resources. Post docs struggle to find out how much time. Allocations. New tiered allocation structure is great, though.

Ulf Schiller - website is useful to manage allocations and users. Looking for information on reports and renewals (allocations and support)

George Ostrouchov - table of resource providers. Trying to find certain software stacks. Hard to find which systems have software. This changes occassionally. CentOS 07 vs. 09 for example (Operations)

FAQ

Brian O’Shea - a lot of users would like help in how to choose which resource

• Laura - https://allocations.access-ci.org/resources

  • Laura, the link you sent me is very close to what our local “Data storage finder” does. It’s VERY helpful - thanks! - Brian O’Shea

• Alana - Support will be providing what we call an “ARA” (access resource advisor) that should be live in a few weeks - particularly for those that are completely new!

Vojtech Vlcek - really great that students can get started and use resources. Website can easily feel overwhelmed, streamlined based on their experience.

Shawn shares about personas work launching soon to try and get the right folks to the right information.

Ulf Schiller - documentation for students is important. Job management from Purdue was great. Curated collection would be good to have.

Harel - curated content gets out of date quickly, so having new user information current is most important. Let’s try to use computers intelligently to guide to current information rather than collect it.

Vojtech - no sense in repeating the same steps as our advisors

Outreach, Tej, presentation materials somewhere

We represent different communities what we represent and what not - have each committee member provide a sentence or two of their areas of expertise and what community they represent

I am really impressed with what is in the works, we are working on that and so on. Was a sceptic on how prepared the organization is prepared to accept input on who

 A short survey might also be a good way to capture the diverse technical areas represented

10 min

1. Recap/Actions

2. Next steps

   1. Spring 2024

   2. Topics

3. Close

Laura Herriott

1. Recap/Actions

   1. New chair selected: Wladimir Lyra

   2. Globus - look into ways to share with researchers more about data transfer topics and bring back discussion topics for the storage futures working group

   3. Website - several improvements for Allocations interfaces will be addressed in the website redesign forthcoming. Operations opportunity for list of software on RPs. FAQ is positive, with some opportunities to get the right information into the right hands.

2. Next meeting

   1. Feb, Mar, Apr 2024 (Requested a poll with 3 options)

      1. Avoid these dates -

         1. APS: March 3-8, 2024 &

         2. ACS: March 17-21, 2024

   2. Topics

      1. Responses to the feedback above. What ACCESS has in progress and what the timeline is to understand how feedback is being addressed

         1. Should we prepare something by tracks?

      2. Goals

3. Close