ACCESS Resource Provider Communication - August 24, 2022

Owned by Leslie Froeschl
Aug 31, 2022
3 min read

I am sending this on behalf of the ACCESS Track 3/CONECT/Operations team. For the short term, we are going to use the sp-forum and sp-software email lists to communicate with you about important transition information you’ll need to successfully integrate into the ACCESS ecosystem. This email includes important information and actions. Please forward this message to any resource provider (RP) staff that may not be on these email lists but need to know this information. Please note that in ACCESS, we will use the term “resource provider” (RP) instead of “service provider.” We plan to send out a weekly communication with pertinent information, so please be on the lookout for those weekly emails! 

Join the ACCESS Resource Provider Slack Space! 

We have established a new Slack space for ease of communications between RPs and staff from across the ACCESS tracks. Please join this space by clicking : https://join.slack.com/t/rpaccesscommu-wyz4369/shared_invite/zt-1eph1a7za-gFDx9V9FPT0cLMIDihIBIg
(NOTE the new link—we discovered that the link that was sent out previously expired.)

Transition to ACCESS Ticketing System 

On Saturday, August 27, 2022, we are planning to migrate the XSEDE Request Tracker ticketing system to the ACCESS Request Tracker ticketing system. We estimate that the migration will take 4 hours and will take place from 8am ET to noon ET. After the transition is complete, XSEDE tickets will be managed through Welcome To The CILogon OpenID Connect Authorization Service (rather than tickets.xsede.org). Help tickets via email can still be submitted through help@xsede.org until September 1, 2022. Help requests submitted through the XSEDE user portal will be directed to the ACCESS help webform. 

New Infrastructure News Publishing Beta Testing

During the week of August 21-27 ACCESS resource providers are invited to beta test a new ACCESS Infrastructure News publishing interface. Please follow these Operational Status Communication instructions to request access and then publish infrastructure news.

Infrastructure news published through this interface will be visible to researchers on the ACCESS Support Portal - Outages Page. The ability to subscribe to infrastructure news and receive email notifications will not be available on September 1st. ACCESS is exploring ways for the ACCESS community to subscribe and receive infrastructure and other news through email.

Integrating Allocated Resources with ACCESS

On August 1, 2022 ACCESS released to resource providers (RPs) instructions for becoming “ACCESS-Allocated Production Compute/Storage/Cloud” by September 1, 2022. RPs with questions or needed assistance may:

  • Email help@xsede.org using the Subject: Help with ACCESS roadmap activity <title>

  • Join a weekly ACCESS Roadmaps meeting starting Friday Aug 5, 2022 11:00am to Noon Central through Friday Sep 30, 2022 on Zoom at:Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting

RDR Updates 

ACCESS Allocations asks all Resource Providers to please update the following fields in the XSEDE Resource Description Repository (RDR) at their earliest convenience for all of their resources that will be available for allocation requests on or after September 1, 2022:

  • Resource Description:

    • To provide an overview of the associated hardware and networking fabrics

  • Recommended Use:

    • To highlight the types of use cases the resource is intended to support

  • Allocations Description:

    • To clarify what is to be considered a service unit on the resource

The above fields will be displayed to researchers when browsing the resources available through ACCESS, and will help them identify which resources would be best for their work. 

Edits to these data fields can be made at rdr.xsede.org. If you have trouble updating these fields, please contact help@xsede.org with the text you would like populated within these fields and Allocations staff will update the information on your behalf. If a resource provider does not want to edit their current entries, no action is required.

Thank you for your assistance during this transitional period.

ACCESS Project Identifier Changes

ACCESS is reducing the number of project identifiers from 3 in XSEDE to 1 ACCESS grant number. In order to do this there is action required by Resource Providers for a small number of projects. Please see this document for the full list of 56 projects to update, if they have an allocation on your system(s). Thank you for your assistance.  

For any other questions or feedback, please email help@xsede.org with a subject line “ACCESS Feedback.”