PATh’s Support for Research Computing and the CC* Program

We are here to help with your CC* Proposal (NSF 23-526)!

Campuses with awards from the NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) Program play an important role in supporting Open Science. To date, 25 CC* campuses contribute to the processing and storage capacity of the Open Science Pool (OSPool) that is harnessed weekly by more than 2M jobs.

Email Us How We Can Help

Enhancing the capacity of Research Computing of US campuses through local deployment and cross campus sharing is fully aligned with the vision of our NSF funded project - Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh). Our project is committed to support CC* projects from proposal, through deployment, to operation.

Proposal

Proposals in response to the 2023 CC* program solicitation (NSF 23-526) are due on 11 September 2023. Please contact us at [email protected] (the earlier the better!) with any questions or requests you may have regarding the involvement of PATh in your proposed project. Our technology and services are readily available to support a spectrum of CC* projects.

The NSF 23-526 solicitation explicitly mentions the OSG services we provide as a means to meet requirements for the following areas:

(4) Campus Computing and the Computing Continuum

NSF recommends reaching out to PATh for “technical direction/expertise during their proposal development” and suggests working with the OSG to contribute its “minimum of 20% shared time on the cluster” to the OSPool.

(5) Regional Computing awards

NSF strongly encourages joining PATh, and suggests working with the OSG to contribute its “minimum of 20% shared time on the cluster” to the OSPool.

(6) Data Storage awards

NSF solely mentions the OSG’s Open Science Data Federation as a federated data sharing fabric to share its required “20% of the disk/storage space on the proposed storage system.”

Let the PATh team help with your proposal

The National Science Foundation Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program (NSF 23-526) invests in coordinated campus and regional-level cyberinfrastructure improvements and innovation.

PATh has experience offering consulting to CC* projects during the proposal phase for the following aspects of the proposed project:

  • Sharing data with authorized users via the Open Science Data Federation (OSDF)
  • Bringing the power of high throughput computing via the OSPool to your researchers
  • Meeting CC*-required resource sharing as specified in (NSF 23-526), and other options for integrating with the OSG Consortium
  • Providing connections to help with data storage systems for shared inter-campus or intra-campus resources
  • Building regional computing networks
  • Developing science gateways to utilize high throughput computing via the OSPool

Please do not hesitate (or wait too long) to contact us at [email protected] with questions or requests for letters of support regarding your CC* proposed project.

Deployment

Our experienced and friendly team of engineers and facilitators is dedicated to supporting system engineers and campus research groups. This team provides networking, computing and data storage consulting in support of proposals, providing expertise and guidance.

Post award, these teams continue their support to ensure smooth integration and onboarding into the OSPool or OSDF. The facilitation team also provides extensive support to researchers with regular training, weekly office hours, documentation, videos and more.

Please contact us at [email protected] to schedule a consultation to discuss deployment of OSG resources at your campus.

Operation

After your campus has integrated with the OSPool or OSDF, our team offers continued support to make the best use of computational resources at your campus. This includes troubleshooting of OSG services as well as providing accounting data for the research projects and kinds of research making use of your resources. Also, our CC* liaison will meet with you periodically to see how things are going and what we can do to better support you.

Our staff remains available to assist you with meeting your goals as your research computing needs evolve. If you or your researchers have any questions or issues, please contact us at [email protected].

OSG supported Colleges and Universities contributing via the CC* program:

CC* Campus impact on Open Science

The OSG Consortium has been working with CC* campuses pre and post award for several years. These campuses have made significant contributions in support of science, both on their own campus and for the entire country.

Computing

In the last year, twenty-two campuses contributed over 235 million core hours to researchers via the OSPool (April 2021 - March 2022). These contributions supported more than 230 research groups, campuses, multi-campus collaborations, and gateways, and in fields of study ranging from the medicine to economics, and from genomics to physics. Every month, OSG services help additional campuses to support open science by sharing their resources via the OSPool.

Data Storage

As of March 2022, the Open Science Data Federation integrates 10 data origins, making data accessible via 20 caches, 6 of which are strategically located in the R&E network backbone. The CC* solicitation of 2022 (NSF 22-582) encourages responses that would add data origins or caches at campuses.

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.