The NSF-sponsored Northeast Cyberteam program (https://necyberteam.org) is matching student research computing facilitators with research projects at small and medium sized institutions that need help making use of high performance computing resources. Students are selected based on relevant domain knowledge and level of interest in exploring the Research Computing Facilitator role as a career path. Each student is paired with an experienced mentor, and each project lasts 3-5 months.
The poster presents results from two of the ~10 Northeast Cyberteam projects that are either completed or in progress at the time of the conference. Students will be prepared to discuss the research projects that they supported, how their efforts advanced each project, reflections on what they learned about the Research Computing Facilitator role, and recommendations on how other sites might make best use of students as Research Computing Facilitators.
In the first project, conducted at the University of Maine, improvements to application performance and parallelization have enabled production of forest attribute data at significantly higher volume, changing the philosophy of forest mapping from creating a single map to creating and assessing thousands of maps, making it possible to assess and (to some degree) trade off errors between maps.
The second project expanded efforts to introduce computational chemistry into the undergraduate chemistry curriculum at Bridgewater State University. Having access to a high performance computer cluster allows for studying "real world" systems and also provides students with an opportunity to experience how research computing is done in academia and/or chemical/pharmaceutical industries.
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Northeast Cyberteam - Building an Environment for Sharing Best Practices and Solutions for Research Computing
The Northeast Cyberteam Program is a
collaborative effort across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and
Massachusetts that seeks to assist researchers at small and
medium-sized institutions in the region with making use of
cyberinfrastructure, while simultaneously building the next
generation of research computing facilitators. Recognizing that
research computing facilitators are frequently in short supply, the
program also places intentional emphasis on capturing and
disseminating best practices in an effort to enable opportunities to
leverage and build on existing solutions whenever practical. The
program combines direct assistance to computationally intensive
research projects; experiential learning opportunities that pair
experienced mentors with students interested in research
computing facilitation; sharing of resources and knowledge across
large and small institutions; and tools that enable efficient
oversight and possible replication of these ideas in other regions.
Each project involves a researcher seeking to better utilize
cyberinfrastructure in research, a student facilitator, and a
mentor with relevant domain expertise. These individuals may be
at the same institution or at separate institutions. The student
works with the researcher and the mentor to become a bridge
between the infrastructure and the research domain. Through
this model, students receive training and opportunities that
otherwise would not be available, research projects get taken to a
higher level, and the effectiveness of the mentor is multiplied.
Providing tools to enable self-service learning is a key concept
in our strategy to develop facilitators through experiential
learning, recognizing that one of the most fundamental skills of
successful facilitators is their ability to quickly learn enough about
new domains and applications to be able draw parallels with their
existing knowledge and help to solve the problem at hand. The
Cyberteam Portal is used to access the self-service learning
resources developed to provide just-in-time information delivery
to participants as they embark on projects in unfamiliar domains,
and also serves as a receptacle for best practices, tools, and
techniques developed during a project. Tools include Ask.CI, an
interactive site for questions and answers; a learning resources
repository used to collect online training modules vetted by
Cyberteam projects that provide starting points for subsequent
projects or independent activities; and a Github repository. The
Northeast Cyberteam was created with funding from the National
Science Foundation, but has developed strategies for sustainable
operations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1659377
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10225112
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 5
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Computing has become an essential component of research and education for nearly every scientific discipline. Meeting the need for support staff who can help faculty make the best use of available computing resources is a significant challenge for small and mid-sized institutions. The NSF-sponsored Northeast Cyberteam is addressing this challenge by building a pool of research computing facilitators that can be shared across institutional boundaries while also developing self-service tools that reduce the support burden. The Cyberteam Portal, developed to support the Northeast Cyberteam has enabled adoption of program methods by other communities of practice and collaboration with the broader research computing community.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Computing has become an essential component of research and education for nearly every scientific discipline. Meeting the need for support staff who can help faculty make the best use of available computing resources is a significant challenge for small and mid-sized institutions. The NSF-sponsored Northeast Cyberteam is addressing this challenge by building a pool of research computing facilitators that can be shared across institutional boundaries while also developing self-service tools that reduce the support burden.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/HPEC43674.2020.9286254
