Search for: All records

Abstract Meeting the United Nation’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) calls for an integrative scientific approach, combining expertise, data, models and tools across many disciplines towards addressing sustainability challenges at various spatial and temporal scales. This holistic approach, while necessary, exacerbates the big data and computational challenges already faced by researchers. Many challenges in sustainability research can be tackled by harnessing the power of advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI). The objective of this paper is to highlight the key components and technologies of CI necessary for meeting the data and computational needs of the SDG research community. An overview of the CI ecosystem in the United States is provided with a specific focus on the investments made by academic institutions, government agencies and industry at national, regional, and local levels. Despite these investments, this paper identifies barriers to the adoption of CI in sustainability research that include, but are not limited to access to support structures; recruitment, retention and nurturing of an agile workforce; and lack of local infrastructure. Relevant CI components such as data, software, computational resources, and human-centered advances are discussed to explore how to resolve the barriers. The paper highlights multiple challenges in pursuing SDGs based on the outcomes of several expert meetings. These include multi-scale integration of data and domain-specific models, availability and usability of data, uncertainty quantification, mismatch between spatiotemporal scales at which decisions are made and the information generated from scientific analysis, and scientific reproducibility. We discuss ongoing and future research for bridging CI and SDGs to address these challenges. 

High-performance computing is a driving force behind scientific innovation and discovery. However, as the number of users and the complexity of high-performance computing systems grow, so does the volume and variability of technical issues handled by sup- port teams. The evolving nature of these issues presents a need for automated tools that can extract clear, accurate, and relevant fre- quently asked questions directly from support tickets. This need was addressed by developing a novel pipeline that incorporates seman- tic clustering, representation learning, and large language models. While prior research laid strong foundations across classification, clustering and large language model-based questions & answers, our work augments these efforts by integrating semantic clustering, domain-specific summarization, and multi-stage generation into a scalable pipeline for autonomous technical support. To prioritize high-impact issues, the pipeline began by filtering tickets based on anomaly frequency and recency. It then leveraged an instruction- tuned large language model to clean and summarize each ticket into a structured issue-resolution pair. Next, unsupervised semantic clus- tering was performed to identify subclusters of semantically similar tickets within broader topic clusters. A large language model-based generation module was then applied to create frequently asked questions representing the most dominant issues. A structured evaluation by subject matter experts indicated that our approach transformed technical support tickets into understandable, factu- ally sound, and pertinent frequently asked questions. The ability to extract fine-grained insights from raw ticket data enhances the scalability, efficiency, and responsiveness of technical support work- flows in high-performance computing environments, ultimately enabling faster troubleshooting and more accessible pathways to scientific discovery. 

High-performance computing (HPC) is widely used in higher education for modeling, simulation, and AI applications. A critical piece of infrastructure with which to secure funding, attract and retain faculty, and teach students, supercomputers come with high capital and operating costs that must be considered against other competing priorities. This study applies the concepts of the production function model from economics with two thrusts: (1) to evaluate if previous research on building a model for quantifying the value of investment in research computing is generalizable to a wider set of universities, and (2) to define a model with which to capacity plan HPC investment, based on institutional production—inverting the production function. We show that the production function model does appear to generalize, showing positive institutional returns from the investment in computing resources and staff. We do, however, find that the relative relationships between model inputs and outputs vary across institutions, which can often be attributed to understandable institution-specific factors. 

The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University has recently released two Generative AI inference tools, AnvilGPT and Purdue GenAI Studio, to the research and campus communities. These services support over 1000 users who use 10+ open-source GenAI models to aid their work. Building on HPC’s long history of using open-source tools, these services are based on customized open-source frameworks and hosted entirely on-prem. This pa- per argues that building custom GenAI services from open-source frameworks is a scalable and cost-effective solution for providing access to Generative AI models. This paper shares the methodology and resources required to develop and host these services and seeks to be a resource for other research computing centers that wish to leverage their HPC investment to create similar services. 

Accurate wait-time prediction for HPC jobs contributes to a positive user experience but has historically been a challenging task. Previous models lack the accuracy needed for confident predictions, and many were developed before the rise of deep learning. In this work, we investigate and develop TROUT, a neural network-based model to accurately predict wait times for jobs submitted to the Anvil HPC cluster. Data was taken from the Slurm Workload Manager on the cluster and transformed before performing additional feature engineering from jobs’ priorities, partitions, and states. We developed a hierarchical model that classifies job queue times into bins before applying regression, outperforming traditional methods. The model was then integrated into a CLI tool for queue time prediction. This study explores which queue time prediction methods are most applicable for modern HPC systems and shows that deep learning-based prediction models are viable solutions. 

This paper reports on the lessons learned from developing and deploying campus-wide large language model (LLM) services at Purdue University for generative AI (GenAI) applications in education and research. We present a frame- work for identifying an LLM solution suite and identify key considerations related to developing custom solutions. While the GenAI ecosystem continues to evolve, the framework is intended to provide a tool- and organization-agnostic approach to guide leaders in conversations and strategy for future work and collaboration in this emerging field. 

Research Computing and Data (RCD) professionals play a crucial role in supporting and advancing research that involve data and/or computing, however, there is a critical shortage of RCD workforce, and organizations face challenges in recruiting and retaining RCD professional staff. It is not obvious to people outside of RCD how their skills and experience map to the RCD profession, and staff currently in RCD roles lack resources to create a professional development plan. To address these gaps, the CaRCC RCD Career Arcs working group has embarked upon an effort to gain a deeper understanding of the paths that RCD professionals follow across their careers. An important step in that effort is a recent survey the working group conducted of RCD professionals on key factors that influence decisions in the course of their careers. This survey gathered responses from over 200 respondents at institutions across the United States. This paper presents our initial findings and analyses of the data gathered. We describe how various genders, career stages, and types of RCD roles impact the ranking of these factors, and note that while there are differences across these groups, respondents were broadly consistent in their assessment of the importance of these factors. In some cases, the responses clearly distinguish RCD professionals from the broader workforce, and even other Information Technology professionals.