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

      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

       5. Need for support for cloud resources, some play for cloud bank? Shawn mentions that awards made on cloud bank, are mostly AI related. They don’t do a lot of domain work, cloud bank is partly seen as a resource.

       6. Based on the discussions John had, they might need some research facilitation, since they might not know their research needs

       7. Alana mentions that they meet with a group where Tom and Sharon are involved in, they meet monthly to discuss and understand their research needs? MATCH plus and MATCH Premier. Its going more and more pertinent. Tom Maiden is also involved if we need to bring in RPs. Tom is also involved in going to the RPs and asking them about their AI/ML needs and based on that, refining our presentations.

       
       
       

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?

   3. Make sure to understand the topics that are going to be covered

   4. Potential for one or two specific team leads depending on the topics

   5. Potential topics:

      • Status of the evaluation?

      • Where we are at with the DEI efforts? Go over the plan in December? Initial schedule of the DEI plan was to have something by SC so we might have a plan by December

      • Personas - maybe have a discussion about this? Alana mentions that no major progress made here. Internally, working on personas. But not a program wide discussion yet. The discussion will be had once Shelley is back next week

      • Continuing on the broadening participation session, we can continue to have something along those lines - looking at our user communities, and. How to expand that.

      • Making some decisions on priorities - be it goals, outreach, communication, personas etc

      • Maybe by next week we can have more data on additional agenda topics from the quarterly meeting feedback

   6. Apart from EC, we want Laura Herriott to be there.
      
      

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

   1. Comms team was tasked with doing assessment and come up with some recommendations after the quarterly meeting

   2. But with the current plannings for SC 23 and time constraints, suggestion that we should go ahead with space planning for SC 24 and then assess the recommendations

   3. EC agrees to Defer the decision till the Comms team can come with recommendations till maybe March 2024

   4. Will have more data as well from badge scanners that will be employed this year at the booth
      
      

6. Potential government shutdown (10 mins) @John Towns

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

   2. No major discussions here since NSF not present

   3. Cancel next week's EC meeting since many EC members will be at the CASC meeting

      
      
      

7. Informational Items (10 mins)

   1. Allocations Stephen Deems

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

         1. thanks again to Alana for all the support

      2. SGX3 now requestable through Allocations project types

      3. DEI WG invite being sent out by Ag

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

         2. Tough scheduling with CASC next week

      4. 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

      5. Communications team chartering WG

         1. Stephen will be EC Sponsor + Co-chair

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

      6. Laura Herriott - 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. Laura, Alana, Dave Wheeler, Tom F., and Shawn. represent the tracks

      7. 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

      8. The RAC Meeting has been added to the engagement tracker

   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

      1. NA

   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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