Aug. 4, 2017 — Four researchers from American universities will work with cyberinfrastructure and high-performance computing experts from XSEDE and U.S. research teams to work on real-world science and engineering projects over the next year in the 2017 Campus Champions Fellows program.
The 2017 cohort are current XSEDE Campus Champions, a collection of faculty, staff and researchers at over 200 U.S. institutions who advise others on their local campus on the use of high-end cyberinfrastructure, including but not limited to XSEDE resources. The goal of the Campus Champions Fellows program is to increase expertise on campuses by including Campus Champions as partners in XSEDE’s ECSS projects.
- Richard Gayler, a professor of computer science at Kennesaw State in Georgia, is paired with Si Liu, a research associate in the high performance computing group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. Gayler has been in academia all his life and was interested in acquiring some non-textbook skills in the development and modernization of HPC codes. Gayler and Liu are supporting PI Gabe Kooperman’s project “Assessing flood risk from threat of Madden-Julian Oscillation amplification.” Kooperman is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine who is working to understand how flood risks will change in the future by including effects of tropical weather patterns (the Madden-Julian Oscillation) in simulations. The TACC Ranch and Stampede systems will be used as a resource for this project.
- Chet Langin, IT research coordinator at Southern Illinois University is paired with Alex Ropelewski, Director of the Biomedical Applications Group at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center (PSC). They are supporting PI Suping Zhou, Research Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at Tennessee State University. Zhou’s project is entitled “Computational Support for Bioinformatics Projects on Assembly Analysis of Fungal Metagenomes for the Discovery of Genes Involved in Important Biological Processes.” Working with Ropelewski, Langin will build skills developing an optimized workflow for Zhou’s polyploidy assembly work – installing programs, writing scripts, and possibly making the workflow and the bioinformatics tools available through the Bridges Galaxy interface.
- Semir Sarajlic, a Research Computing Specialist at Georgia State University, is paired with Suresh Marru, the Deputy Director of the Science Gateways research Center at Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute. They are working with PI Mohan Ramamurthy the Director of the Unidata Program Center at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) on his project “Atmospheric Science in the Cloud: Enabling Data-Proximate Science” on Jetstream and Wrangler. One goal of this work is to make it straightforward for users to pull data from Unidata to request resources dynamically to burst to Jetstream.
- Dan Voss, Director of Research Computing at the University of Kansas, is paired with Rich Knepper, Deputy Director at the Center for Advanced Computing, Cornell University. Rich works in XSEDE’s Capability and Resource Integration group (former Campus Bridging). Activities here bridge between a local campus and XSEDE resources. Projects include workflow submission systems that send jobs to XSEDE Service Provider resources from campus, the creation of shared virtual compute facilities that allow jobs to be executed on multiple resources, data management for researchers with Globus Connect, the creation of local XSEDE Compatible Cluster Systems, or other projects that utilize tools which reduce barriers for scaling analyses from campuses to national cyberinfrastructure.
Accepted Fellows, with the support of their home institution, make a 400-hour time commitment and are paid a stipend to allow them to focus time and attention on these collaborations. The program also includes funding for two visits, each ranging from one to two weeks, to an ECSS, PI or conference site to enhance the collaboration. Most Fellows and mentors met at PEARC17, July 9-13 in New Orleans. Fellows will present their work at PEARC18.
For more information on the XSEDE Campus Champions Fellows program, including all past cohorts, visit: https://www.xsede.org/ccfellows.
Source: XSEDE