1. Fostering Education and Research via Regional Partnerships
Greg Monaco, Ph.D.
Great Plains Network & Kansas State University
Funded by National Science Foundation Award # to
Great Plains Network and Kansas State University

2. Background
Funding agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) have made significant investments in the national cyberinfrastructure to help campus-level researchers answer challenging scientific questions.
A diverse set of organizations has emerged to support access to this infrastructure.
Nonetheless, gaps remain.

3. What is Cyberinfrastructure?

4. What is Cyberinfrastructure about?
Size
Speed
 Problems that can’t fit on a PC because they need lots of RAM or lots of disk space or may take a very long time to run on a PC.  Big data and hpc are things harder than you know how to deal with today on your desktop computer.
Laptop

5. CI Is About Accelerating Discovery
Simulation of phenomena that are too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too dangerous, or too costly to study in the real world.
Analysis of data sets that are large, complicated, unstructured or otherwise unwieldy.
But what big data and HPC are *really* about is accelerating discovery!
These capabilities not only complement the traditional modes of inquiry of theory and experiment, but have become modes in their own right.
Next – I’d like to show you what OSU is doing to facilitate these new modes of research.

6. A Layered View of Cyberinfrastructure
Campus
Regional
National
Computation, Storage, Networking, Tools, Services, People
Network Organizations, Statewide Collaborations, Library Associations, Research Projects, Tools, Services, People
Universities, High Performance Computing Centers, Data Centers, Libraries, Tools, Services, People
There’s a lot of variation within each category
PEOPLE common to all layers
Activate the people across the layers.
Activate the middle layer to better communicate up down sideways
Better coordination and communication

7. Examples of Regional Organizations
State and Regional Networks
KanREN, Great Plains Network
High Performance Computing Facilities
Emerging Partnerships
KanSHARE, OneOCII, ShowMeCI
MCBIOS: Midsouth Bioinformatics Consortium
Regional Big Data Hubs

8. How Can Regional Orgs Work Better?
Formed a conference organizing committee
Solicit white papers from interested parties and organizations.
37 white papers
98 authors
80 Organizations
Select among the papers and send conference invitations to the selected group of authors.
Held the meeting in October, 2015, in Kansas City, MO.
39 participants
Developed a final report and a set of recommendations to funding agencies and the community at large.
Questions:
What should be the role of regional organizations in providing broader support to computational researchers? (9)
How can these organizations expand researcher engagement to underrepresented communities? (10)
How can these organizations sustain timely and relevant education and outreach efforts to computational researchers over the long term? (13)
How can efforts across these organizations be effectively coordinated? (10)
What is an effective collaboration environment and structure? (8)
How can these organizations promote and coordinate sharing of hardware, software and expertise across campus, state, and regional boundaries? (9)
Who responded:
State and regional networking and research facilitation organizations
Other organizations that are interested in data and/or computation
Minority serving institutions
Researchers
Campus research support staff
Organizations interested in workforce development in support of access to computational infrastructure
Perspectives:
Individual
Campus
Research community
Collaborative
Educational
Technical Solutions

9. Contributions
We are poised to use computation as pervasively as we use and the Internet
Regional organizations are key
We are stronger by working together
We share common values & a common vision
Expert personnel are our most valuable asset
Particular challenge to reach next generation of computational scientists who are students at small colleges
What organizations may be productively considered regional in nature to further advance utilization of the computational infrastructure?
Research and Education Networks, state and multi-state
Statewide Collaborations (e.g., OneOCII)
State High Performance Computing Centers (e.g., Massachusetts Green HPC)
Projects specifically targeting uptake of advanced computational research (e.g., ACI-REF, Regional XSEDE Campus Champions)
Campus High Performance Computing Centers that serves a broader set of campuses (e.g., Holland Computing Center)
Regional Big Data Hubs
Regional and State Library Associations
Specific research projects that span multiple campuses
What constitutes the National Computational Infrastructure?
XSEDE as both a collection of computational resources and technical support for using them (centers, campus champions and training/documentation)
Regional Computational Entities
Campus High Peformance/High Throughput computational centers
State, regional and national R&E networks
What are the shared values across these organizations?
Importance of people
Importance of research
Importance of High Performance/High Throughput Computing for solving complex problems
Importance of educating the next generation workforce of scientists and cyberinfrastructure professionals
Importance of expanding the user base
There was overwhelming consensus that our most valuable resource is our expert personnel.
What is the shared vision for a national cyberinfrastructure?
Career Friendly: workforce development, retention, and career paths are a primary need and concern, more so than physical resources.
Pervasive: researchers have access to needed data and computing regardless of location.
Easy to use: Computation in science becomes as easy as sending or completing a file transfer
Connected: Seamless connectivity between people and technology at all scales, both vertically and horizontally, that facilitates and promotes collaboration between necessarily diverse organizations.  
Shared: organizations my share resources, human as well as technology, with each other and the nation at large
Distributed: both human and technology, while retaining local autonomy, with a shared goal of maximizing benefits to all. Distributed physical resources are an important catalyst to promote distributed and highly scalable workforce development.
Dynamic: the scale of various organizations and varied physical resource centers are equipped with resources to meet needed goals (e.g., engagement and training of researchers is most effective locally)
How do these organizations currently support the computational infrastructure?
Providing mechanisms for effective horizontal (peer) collaborations and support (eg. Pacific Research Platform, SURA),
Bridging the huge scale ranges from a researcher lab to peta-scale national resources (e.g., centralized campus HPC resources, RENs, MGHPCC),
Inform and equip the workforce providing the aggregate national CI (e.g., Campus Champions, ACI REFs),
Providing larger scale resources than are routinely available at the campus level,
Actively engaging researchers (e.g., Quilt has a researcher engagement program that has attempted to coordinate with ACI-REF and the Campus Bridging Program)
ESnet Science Outreach provides training to campuses and regional networks and other recipients of regional Campus CI awards
R&E Network with an XSEDE campus champion
R&E Network working on common project with Regional Library Association
Campus library working with HPC center (e.g., CU-Boulder)
Hold Mozilla workshops/Train the trainer
Internet2 Broadening the Reach doing campus visits to smaller institutions
Internet2 and regional CC awardees collaborating on training

10. Recommendations: Regional Networks
Add personnel dedicated to computation education & outreach
Actively seek out and engage researchers at smaller campuses
Identify and catalog computational & data resources
Facilitate sharing of computational resources
Expand educational & meeting activities to include topics of interest to researchers w/ computation/data needs
Coordinate efforts with one another (and national networks)
Coordinate end to end performance troubleshooting
Regional networks are well positioned to help expand access to other components of the CI ecosystem. They are self-sustaining and have tentacles into the smaller colleges and universities. They were originally created to improve access to the national infrastructure and improve science. We recommend considering that they consider more broadly adopting the following practices:
Adding personnel dedicated to computational education and outreach efforts. These are professionals who can communicate about both the science and the cyberinfrastructure. Their role is to enable researchers to more effectively and efficiently reach their research goals. 

Actively seeking out and communicating with researchers at smaller institutions who have unique data storage and/or computational needs. Regional network personnel are in a unique position to assist these researchers, who often have limited time and limited local resources, to navigate the CI terrain. 

Identifying and cataloging computational and data resources across their region. Even within campuses, computational and other network reachable resources are often unknown to researchers and campus IT departments. An inventory of resources would be invaluable, not only for researchers, but for regional network organizations in order to provide more resources while keeping costs down. 

Facilitating the sharing of computational and data resources across their region. Not all computational resources are appropriate for all research problems and not all researchers have ready access to computational resources. Sharing of resources across campus boundaries will expand availability of the most appropriate resources to researchers who need those resources. 

Expanding educational and meeting activities to include topics of interest to researchers with computational and data storage needs. Regional networks are geographic centers for cyberinfrastructure and can convene researchers from larger and smaller campuses to learn from one another, to problem solve and to obtain campus, state, regional and national updates. 

Coordinating efforts with one another (e.g., via the Quilt). State and regional networks have a long history of working together and assisting one another. The Quilt, the member organization of regional networks, currently has an initiative to strengthen researcher engagement and increasing coordination efforts within the R&E networking community. 

More closely coordinating with national activities like XSEDE Campus Champions, Open Science Grid, and ACI-REF. Regional networks can serve as a communication conduit regarding campus and regional infrastructure and requirements while sharing information about national computation resources with their campus communities. 

Coordinating efforts with national R&E networks such as Internet2 and ESNet that have similar goals to support academic research for the benefit of furthering scientific exploration. 

Coordinating end-to-end performance troubleshooting. When problems occur, it is important to rapidly discover things where went awry and get them back on track. 
Actively implement and promote performance measurement tools such as perfSONAR. 

Funding agencies play a vital role in providing direction to the national cyberinfrastructure community in identifying priorities and changing dynamics.
Assist withSupport acquisition of regional cyberinfrastructure resources to serve a geographic region where the performing regional organization shows commitment to some or all of the following: Operation of the CI resource (including funding the system administration staff, operations cost of the resource and network connectivity); user support, outreach, user training and education; integration of the system with national CI, e.g. level 2 XSEDE provider and OSG partner, and other regional CI, low barrier of entry for regional researchers to increase and broaden participation; integration of the instrument with high­performance networking and advanced data transfer and data sharing capabilities.
Note: Since many consortia that might operate regional CI resources are also administered by a member university, they must compete on their own campus to acquire a limited submission slot in response to infrastructure solicitations (e.g., NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation competition). At one time, consortia did not compete for limited slots on their own campus. This made it easier for funding agencies to award funds for resources to regional consortia (with bylaws & clearly executed membership agreements) on behalf of their entire membership.
Fund regional centers of CI excellence that are committed to the principles of sharing, education and outreach. Regional centers of CI excellence would assist with sharing resources at multiple levels, with engaging underserved groups and with increasing educational opportunities in the region. These centers would also provide a liaison function between campuses and national infrastructure. Successful models are starting to emerge. However, rather than cloning existing models it is essential that regional CI centers are unique to and meet the needs of a geographic area.
Develop a policy to require resource-sharing plan akin to data management plan.
Create a forum for sharing technical expertise developed within university systems on behalf their campuses and national community.
Invest in workforce development. For example, National Science Foundation awards to fund the creation of and initial support for Campus Cyberinfrastructure Engineers has lead to increased awareness for this area of specialization across the US. Funding agencies can encourage the creation of new career paths such as a Computational and Data Science Research Specialist, and Cyberinfrastructure Networking Engineer. Since cross-over between domain knowledge and technical expertise is to be encouraged, new career paths would be open to domain scientists who have acquired sufficient expertise in a given technology to become a critical component of the current cyberinfrastructure workforce.

11. Learn more…

12. Great Plains Network
GPN is YOUR REGIONAL partner for advanced cyberinfrastructure
“Think Tank” concept
FREE FREE FREE FREE (courtesy of H. Neeman)
Help to get access to resources and training that are not practical for your campus
Computing
Storage
Software
People

13. GPN Background Founded by researchers and for researchers
Initially funded by the National Science Foundation
One of the largest aggregators for Internet2
GPN has grown because of a shared commitment to maintain an organization that sustains a collaborative and interdisciplinary focus among the membership.
GPN was initially funded via a series of competitive awards from the National Science Foundation and NSF’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Office. The purpose of the awards was to build a regional organization that sustains and facilitates research collaboration via advanced networking and high performance computing. GPN remains committed to its founding principles to grow and empower the regional community of research and education professionals to learn from one another, to partner together when it is of mutual interest, and to collaborate using advanced technologies. As such, GPN is one of the few regional aggregators with dedicated resources in support of these principles.
The Great Plains Network, as one of the largest aggregators for Internet2, provides national and international connectivity for eight Midwest state networks serving all types of educational institutions from K-12 to universities. GPN was the fist connector to the original Internet2 (I2) Abilene Network, and one of the first 2x10g connectors to I2. While the topology of the GPN physical network has changed over time, with some members finding alternate paths, the GPN membership has grown because of a shared commitment to maintain an organization that sustains this collaborative and interdisciplinary focus among the membership
Like other US regional research and education networks and GigaPoPs, GPN is faced with a dynamic national network environment and rapidly changing member needs.

14. GPN Strategic Partners
State Networks
ARE-ON
KanREN
MOREnet
Network Nebraska
OneNet
REED (SD)
Organizations
Greater Western Library Association (GWLA)
Internet2
MCBIOS
Quilt
XSEDE
High Performance Computing (HPC) Centers
Arkansas HPC Center (UAF)
Institute for Computational Research in S&E (KSU)
Holland Computing Center (UNL)
UM Bioinformatics Consortium
OSCER (OU)
OSU HPC Center
SDSU HPC Center
Tandy Supercomputing Center  at the Oklahoma Innovation Institute
WSU HPC Center

15. CI Resource Lifecyle PHASE 1: New Equipment PHASE 2: Midlife
Underscribed – Need users to justify equipment
PHASE 2: Midlife
Humming along
New users are welcome
PHASE 3: Refresh time
Oversubscribed
Preparing a new proposal
New users needed to justify new funding

16. GPN at the Nexus Communication Expert to Expert CIO to CIO
Technical
Domain Science
Interdisciplinary
CIO to CIO
Campus to Campus
Campus to Regional to National

17. GPN At Work Facilitate multi-institution collaborations
Form Partnerships on Behalf of GPN Memberships
MCBIOS – MidSouth Bioinformatics Consortium
GWLA – Greater Western Library Alliance
GLOBUS – University of Chicago/Argonne
XSEDE Campus Champion Program
Foster Best Practice
KanSHARE, ShowMeCI
XSEDE Campus Champions
Lifecycle Data Management & Curatation
Communicate Latest Developments
Website, Weekly News by Kate Adams
Research Support and other GPN Services
Facilitate development of multi-institution collaborations
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Award ( ): Data Lifecycle Planning to develop a partnership among library, technical and research faculty and staff across KU, Greater Western Library Alliance & GPN membership
GpENI - Global Environment for Network Innovation testbed between KU, KSU, UMKC & UNL (2008 – Present)
Extending the Reach Project ( ) - NSF/EDUCAUSE Award for GPN Institutions to pilot shibboleth
Form partnerships with other organizations on behalf of GPN membership:
MCBIOS (bioinformatics),
GWLA (academic libraries),
Globus
Communicate the latest developments across institutions
Provide resources for the development of communities of interest
K20
Cyberinfrastructure
Bioinformatics
Data Management
CIOs (1st Meeting in May, 2012)
Annual Conference (May 29, 30, 31, 2013)
Nationally recognized keynote speakers
Unique combination of research and IT/network attendees
Opportunity to learn and network
Graduate Student Award program
GPN Professional Development Program
Other Activities
Participate in TeraGrid/XSEDE Champion Program
Newsletter
Financial support for regional efforts
Oklahoma Supercomputing Symposium
Graduate Student Supercomputing Competition
Letters of support for grant proposals
Web site/wiki for information sharing & knowledge transfer
GPN Research and Cyberinfrastructure Programs (Continued)
Regional Projects relying on advanced networking and cyberinfrastructure
High performance physics: CMS & Atlas Tier2 and Tier3 sites across region
GENI testbed: Regional to National & International
DUSEL engineering laboratory (South Dakota)
CAPS Storm Prediction Center (Oklahoma) & Weather Modeling (South Dakota)
Bioinformatics (Missouri) & Biodiversity Institute (Kansas)
CI Resource Centers Across the GPN Region
Arkansas High Performance Computing Center
BeoCat (Kansas State University)
Holland Computing Center (University of Nebraska)
OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER)
Oklahoma State University High Performance Computing Center (OSUHPCC)
University of Missouri Bioinformatics Consortium (UMBC)
Wichita State University High Performance Computing Center (HiPeCC)

18. GPN Working on Behalf of Members
Annual Conference
Unique combination of research, library and IT/network attendees
Plenary session speakers from I2, NSF, NIH
Numbers
GPN ENCITE Webinars
GPN Summits: CI, Big Data
Teleconferences for Communities of Interest
CIO Roundtable
Workshops
These activities enable
Multi-state collaborations
Grant support 18

19. Bringing It All Together

20. GPN Engagement Activities (1)
Awareness
Emerging Projects
Available Resources
Building CI Community
Networking Annual Meeting  CI Annual Meeting
Workshops
Webinars
Working Groups
Consistent Communication
Inclusiveness – members of our members are welcome
Awareness
Big Data Hubs
GENI
CyberPhysical Systems
Community
Annual Meeting
Speakers
Workshops
Shibboleth
OSG
Webinsrs
Working Groups
Cyberinfrastructure
Data
Networking
Bioscience
Security

21. GPN Engagement Activities (2)
Participation: Membership in other communities
XSEDE Campus Champions
Regional Big Data Hubs
Supercomputing (Denver in 2017)
Facilitation
Matchmaking
Proposal Development
Education and Training
Carpentry Foundation
Regional Syposia (e.g., OK Supercomputing Symposium)
Partnerships: With other CI organizations in your region
DataFOUR
MCBIOS
Big Data Hubs
Participation
Big Data Hub
CyberPhysical Systerms
GENI
OSG
XSEDE
Partnerhips
DataFOUR
Projects
Digital Agriculture
GENI Testbed

22. Questions? /