Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) Awardees Contribute Over 349 Million Core Hours in Last 12 Months

Campus Cyberinfrastructure Award Recipients Power the OSG

OSG partners with campuses across the US, including Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) awardees, to help them share their resources at a regional and national level. The campuses actively contributing CC*-funded resources are shown in the map below; every month, we are working to help more awardees contribute:

349 Million Core Hours Contributed by CC* Campuses

Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC star) award recipients provide a tremendous value to the OSG in support of scientific research. In the past year, nineteen campuses contributed over 349 millon core hours to researchers using distributed high throughput computing (dHTC). (August 2020 - July 2021) These campus cyberinfrastructures supported over 236 scientific research projects in fields of study such as medical sciences, evolutionary sciences, biostatistics, physics and many more. This campus support thoughout the United States contributed to the advancement of science and to researchers both on and off their campuses. The project reseach supported by these contributions include (among many others):

  • COVID-19 research
  • virtual screensing for pain relief compounds
  • light production in heavy-ion collisions
  • genomic tools to understand the evolutionary process of marine invasion
  • network optimization for large-scale scientific workflow

The CC* Program

The National Science (NSF) Foundation supports the OSG and campuses that contribute resources to it. For 2021 the National Science Foundation funds the Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program (NSF 21-528). This program invests in coordinated campus-level networking and cyberinfrastructure improvements, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. Learning and workforce development (LWD) in cyberinfrastructure is explicitly addressed in the program. Science-driven requirements are the primary motivation for any proposed activity.

Upcoming Deadlines: October 11, 2021

The NSF supports awards in 5 program areas:

  • Data-Driven Networking Infrastructure for the Campus and Researcher awards will be supported at up to $500,000 total for up to 2 years
  • Regional Connectivity for Small Institutions of Higher Education awards will be supported at up to $1,000,000 total for up to 2 years
  • Network Integration and Applied Innovation awards will be supported at up to $1,000,000 total for up to 2 years
  • Campus Computing and the Computing Continuum awards will be supported at up to $400,000 total for up to 2 years
  • Planning Grants and CI-Research Alignment awards will be supported for up to $200,000 total for up to two years

OSG Can Help with Your CC* Proposal

The OSG, funded partly through the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh), has significant experience working with CC* applicants and awardees, offering letters of support and consulting for:

  • bringing the power of the OSG to your researchers
  • gathering science drivers and planning local computing resources
  • CC*-required resource sharing for the Campus Compute category, and other options for integrating with OSG

In the most recent call for proposals (NSF 21-528), joining the OSG is mentioned as a potential path to sharing resources with the wider research community:

Proposals are required to commit to a minimum of 20% shared time on the cluster and describe their approach to making the cluster available as a shared resource external to the campus, […] One possible approach to implementing such a federated distributed computing solution is joining a multi-campus or national federated system such as the OSG.

The OSG team actively works with campuses to integrate them smoothly into the OSG. We have an experienced and friendly team of engineers and facilitators dedicated to supporting campus computational groups and ensuring a positive onboarding with the flexibility to meet your configuration needs. To get started please email OSG Support.

Contributing to the Open Science Pool

Many other schools, in addition to CC* awardees, contribute resources to the Open Science Pool. View them here. CC* awardees are a subset of the overall contributions by educational institutions. In fact, many campuses have used their OSG Pool contributions to aid in the success of their subsequent CC* award application to NSF.

Open Science is Open to You!

These campuses are contributing to an HTCondor pool that OSG users access via the access points operated by the OSG. OSG is operating an HTCondor pool in support of Open Science. Any researcher in the US can use the services of the OSG access points to harness the capacity of the pool. All the researcher needs to do is go to OSG Connect and get an OSG Account. (It’s free!) The researcher does not have to belong to a collaboration (big or small) nor to a campus (big or small).

These colleges and Universities are active contributors to the Open Science Pool via the CC* program:

This project is supported by National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement OAC-2030508. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.