Aug. 27 — The Campus Champions program, a collaborative effort between XSEDE and campus representatives to promote the use of cyberinfrastructure in education and research, has reached two new benchmarks: 200 institutions across the United States now participate in the program, and all 50 states and all EPSCoR jurisdictions (except Guam) are represented with the addition of the University of Maine (Bruce Segee, Director of Advanced Computing).
Dr. Segee is a faculty member at the University of Maine, where his focus is in the area of instrumentation, industrial automation, and computer control of machinery. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in microprogramming, computer architecture, hardware applications of C, and industrial computer control.
“HPC resources are sort of like a car engine: researchers should have access to good ones, but the vast majority should not be installing and maintaining their own systems in order to move their research forward,” Segee said. “XSEDE can act as the ‘mechanic’ in this way. The vast majority of research that uses supercomputers isn’t research about supercomputers. XSEDE helps move the domain research forward by lowering the cyberinfrastructure barriers.”
The Campus Champions program supports campus representatives as a local source of knowledge about XSEDE, as well as other digital services, opportunities and resources. There are now 253 champions at 200 institutions.
Campus Champion coordinator Kay Hunt has taken the program to this point from birth in 2008. Hunt continues to work with champions, holding meetings and gathering feedback from the group to help direct the education and outreach efforts of the XSEDE project. The champions expand the breadth and depth of knowledge about computational and data-enabled resources and services available at the local, regional, national, and international level on as many campuses and within as many professional organizations as possible.
“Dr. Segee is a great champion to spotlight because he represents the needs of many campuses across the country,” said Hunt. “He has done tremendous research for decades now, and to have him join XSEDE as a Campus Champion is a perfect fit. He matches our other 252 champions in terms of his passion for high-performance computing research and his desire to help the community at large.”
“The last few quarters I haven’t even needed to ‘recruit’ as I did when we first started,” Hunt said. “Scientists, researchers and engineers across the country know about Campus Champions and reach out to me about getting involved. The program has absolutely taken off and is one of the stars of the XSEDE project.”
Champions not only provide researchers with information regarding high-performance computing and cyberinfrastructure specific to that campus, but champions can also become a source of start-up allocations or act as a liaison to interact directly with XSEDE staff.
About XSEDE
The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise. XSEDE accelerates scientific discovery by enhancing the productivity of researchers, engineers, and scholars by deepening and extending the use of XSEDE’s ecosystem of advanced digital services and by advancing and sustaining the XSEDE advanced digital infrastructure. XSEDE is a five-year, $121-million project and is supported by the National Science Foundation.
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Source: XSEDE