**Resource Provider: Lisa Perez

perez@tamu.edu
Texas A&M
High Performance Research Computing
Timezone: Central

Director for Advanced Computing Enablement at Texas A&M University, High Performance Research Computing
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisaperez-io/

Availability:

Monday 1/27 from 1 pm -3 pm

Via sign up form:

Please describe your experience with supercomputing
I use supercomputers often

Are you familiar with the U.S. National Science Foundation's ACCESS program?
Yes, I have used ACCESS in my research

Via pre-survey:

How should we address you?
Lisa

Please describe your experience using advanced research computing?
I have over 30 years of experience in advanced research computing as a researcher, and more than 20 years as an HPC sysadmin and research support specialist.

If you've used ACCESS, what allocation level did you start with?
Explore

What have you used or hope to use the ACCESS website to do?
I have used the ACCESS website to apply for allocations, obtain usage stats, find allocation policies, manage my projects. I hope to use the ACCESS website to login to resources directly.

Remind us what your role is, as it applies to working with ACCESS:
Resource Provider

What is your research domain?
No answer

What courses do you teach?
No answer

What is advanced research computing is your resource particularly well suited for?
AI/ML and computational workloads that can utilize multiple GPUs and/or novel accelerators.

Who are your stakeholders?
No answer

What one thing do you appreciate most about the program?
The Explore level allocations

What one thing would you change about the program?
The high barrier to bring in new resource providers.

Interview guide:

60-90 minute interview. Each task will take approximately 5-10 minutes.

• Login, introductions, set up screen share, record
  
  

• Task 1: Do you know how to set up an ACCESS training session for your resource?
  Interview notes here
  
  

• Task 2: Do you know how to announce outages or other type of news about your resource?
  Interview notes here

• Concise documentation about where outages go
  
  

• Task 3: Do you know how to update resource information and resource contacts?
  Interview notes here

• Yes,

• Likes the new information captured by CiDeR. Thought Public URL or User Guide URL field might have lost it’s value at some point?
  
  

• Task 4: Where can you find XDmod? Do you know how to use this tool?
  Interview notes here
  Would like XDMoD to be responsive - feels like most people use phones
  
  

• Task 5: Where can you find Systems Status information?
  Interview notes here

• Mainly Uses Affinity Group
  
  

• Task 6: Where can you find news just for RPs?
  Interview notes here
  Would not go to a website for Integration News - wants to have it emailed.
  
  

• Task 7: Where can you go for help?
  Interview notes here

Wording confusing - staff chooses “Our System” and it goes internally not to ACCESS

• Task 8: Where would you go to join the RP Slack channel?
  Interview notes here

• Was not very familiar witht eh landing page, but once she became acquainted she appreciated what was on it.
  
  

• Task 9: How can you join the RP Forum?
  Interview notes here

• Joining the RP Forum, and communications about RP Forum, are a little indirect if you don’t see the quick link on the RP landing page. The link off of the accordion was not working for her, or the link on the Get Involved page, possibly because she had logged out.

• How can RPs get involved in the ACCESS community?

  ** Link Join the Resource Provider forum link doesn’t work for everyone / may need to go to login page?

• The quick link to the RP Forum goes to a slack login.
  
  

• Task 10: If you want to get involved and volunteer with the ACCESS community as an RP, where would you go?
  Interview notes here

• Looked on Support/Community
  
  

• Task 11: interview would you be willing to review this pages?
  https://access-ci.org/about/resource-providers/
  https://access-ci.org/get-started/for-resource-providers/
  Interview notes here

• Sending staffs to the roadmaps are too overwhelming, wouldn't start with those, too confusing until people are ramped

• Undergrads confused about whether they can get a Discover project types because they conside themself staff

• Videos like preparing an allocation request could be linked to from
  
  

• Task 12: Are you seeing any trends in types of allocation requests?
  Interview notes here

• Explore, and underrepresented in HPC Explore requests.

• Fewer Discover, probably because of theri model

• People are pretty loyal and remain

On Landing Page:

• Wrap up, thank you

• People need a lot of support getting ACCESS ID and loggin in

• Suggestion for ACCESS CI ID Videos for people that aren't affiliated (#2 on this page)

• Short video on allocation

Also suggest linking to videos from Video Learning center in key spots:

New User, Get your first project