The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a joint Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) announcing the launch of the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem of Services and Support (ACCESS) program. The program will provide services that ensure the continued access and availability of the cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem for the science and engineering research and education communities. This has the potential to grant communities access to resources such as cloud-data infrastructure, testbeds and high performance computing systems, connect supporting researchers with similar research goals, and predict the CI ecosytem’s needs.
The following is a joint Dear Colleague Letter from Margaret Martonosi (Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate) and Manish Parashar (Office Director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure).
September 30, 2022
Dear Colleagues:
The National Science Foundation (NSF), through the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), is excited to announce the start of operations for the fabric of services funded as part of the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem of Services and Support (ACCESS) program. As of September 1, 2022, science and engineering researchers and educators can now benefit from a new set of ACCESS services, as part of an agile, integrated, robust, trustworthy, and sustainable cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem, that will drive new thinking and transformative discoveries. Building on successes from the eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, the ACCESS services will blend agile innovations with stable and scalable operations, and ensure the continued availability of services and support to the S&E research and education community. A key goal of the ACCESS services is to ensure democratized and equitable access to the CI ecosystem.
The ACCESS program teams will coordinate integrated operation of the advanced cyberinfrastructure ecosystem by: (1) simplifying and accelerating allocations to use high performance computing systems; (2) establishing consistent roadmaps to operationally integrate HPC systems, new testbed systems, cloud-based resources, edge instrumentation, and data resources; (3) supporting researchers’ needs via workflow automation utilities and self-serve knowledgebases, as well as brokering personal assistance by matching researchers needs with skilled mentor/student teams and/or cyberinfrastructure professionals (CIP) with common research interests.; (4) measuring system usage data to monitor capacity, optimize algorithm performance, and conceivably to apply machine learning to forecast future CI needs; and (5) amplifying ecosystem awareness by reaching out to research groups and communities who have not yet made extensive use of the advanced CI ecosystem.
NSF has launched ACCESS in response to insights gained from community feedback, as well as guidance provided by the strategic plan developed by the National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem, the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure, responses from Requests for Information, and community workshops such as the CI Workforce Development Workshop 2020. ACCESS strongly emphasizes democratizing engagement and inclusiveness of the advanced CI ecosystem as called for in the recent Missing Millions report. The advanced CI ecosystem will leverage experts and integrate tools from a portfolio of programs and projects with aligned missions, including, but not limited to, Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (CyberTraining), Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*), Research Coordination Networks: Fostering and Nurturing a Diverse Community of CI Professionals (RCN:CIP), Partnership for High-Throughput Computing (PaTH), and Advanced Computing Systems and Services (ACSS).
Through this DCL, NSF invites researchers, educators, and CI professionals to take advantage of multiple opportunities to directly participate in NSF’s advanced CI ecosystem via ACCESS as:
- Members of the User Advisory Board or External Advisory Board;
- Reviewers of allocation requests for the HPC marketplace;
- Administrators of the On-Ramps allocations utility to bridge campus and ACCESS resources;
- Mentor/student teams or Cyberinfrastructure Professionals to be matched with researcher needs; and/or
- Evaluators of the new framework to analyze system usage and performance.
If you are interested in participating, or have questions, please contact the ACCESS team at http://ACCESS.qltdclient.com/about/Contact or by emailing Info@ACCESS-CI.org. More information about the ACCESS program is available at https://access-ci.org.
Sincerely,
Margaret Martonosi
Assistant Director
Computer and Information Science and EngineeringManish Parashar
Office Director
Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure
