What is campus bridging and what is XSEDE doing about it?

Abstract

The term "campus bridging" was first used in the charge given to an NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure task force. That task force developed this description of campus bridging: "Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist's campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the 'virtual' aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO."Campus bridging is more a viewpoint and a set of approaches to usability, software, and information concerns than a particular set of tools or software. We outline here several specific use cases that have been identified as priorities for XSEDE in the next four years. These priorities include documentation, deployment of software used entirely outside of XSEDE, and software that helps bridge from individual researcher to campus to XSEDE cyberinfrastructure. We also describe early pilot tests and means by which the user community may stay informed of campus bridging activities and participate in the implementation of Campus Bridging tools created by XSEDE. Metrics are still being developed, and will include (1) the number of campuses that adopt and use Campus Bridging tools developed by XSEDE and(2) the number of and extent to which XSEDE-developed Campus Bridging tools are adopted among other CI projects.

Research Computing at a Business University

“…The ScaleMP cluster was difficult for our faculty to use however, so for our second HPC generation in 2016, we opted for a 16 node Rocks cluster. It was at this time that XSEDE's Campus Resource Integration (CRI) [4,5] group was brought in to help roll out the Rocks cluster, a feat we likely would not have been able to do alone due to the lack of official support channels. Around this time, we also noticed that the Cassandra/Docker cluster was causing too much focus on teaching students how to use it rather than focusing on the data science they had intended.…”

Implementation of Simple XSEDE-Like Clusters

“…Of the challenges identified in 2011, the one that has proved most problematic is interoperability of campus CI facilities at the campus level [7]. There has been some prior work on economics and benefits to sharing of campus resources [8].…”

Methods For Creating XSEDE Compatible Clusters

“…The XCBC build has been available for some time as a "Rocks Roll" [1][2] [3]. The current contents of the XCBC are described in detail in the Knowledge Base document "What software is installed on a "bare-bones" XSEDE-compatible Rocks cluster?"…”