Blue Waters, XSEDE sign collaborative agreement

The Blue Waters petascale computing project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) have signed a collaborative agreement, bringing together the National Science Foundation's two largest cyberinfrastructure projects. Under the agreement, Blue Waters will participate as a Level 2 Service Provider in the XSEDE Service Provider Forum, a group that facilitates the sharing of experiences and leveraging of common tools among sites providing digital resources to the national science and engineering research community. "Blue Waters and XSEDE have a common mission to accelerate discovery by providing exceptional resources, tools and support the Nationals research communities. The Blue Waters project team members look forward to working with XSEDE to expand the impact and productivity of the science and engineering scholarly investigation teams our projects support," said Blue Waters project director Bill Kramer. The Blue Waters and XSEDE projects have collaborated for several years on a successful series of educational efforts, including the Extreme Scaling Workshop series which address the challenges of large-scale heterogeneous computing and encourage the exchange of information and best practices. Blue Waters and XSEDE also use common tools, including the Inca verification and validation tool to manage system tests and Globus Online for data movement and variants of the XDMod software tools The XSEDE and Blue Waters teams also are sharing service request ticket data and cyber-protection information in an effort to better understand and respond to user issues. "With the significant overlap in the science teams supported by Blue Waters and XSEDE, the coordination of the supporting digital services and resources is very important to enhancing the impact both projects can have on the science and engineering research and education efforts of those teams," said John Towns, PI and project director for XSEDE. As a Level 2 Service Provider, Blue Waters will maintain separate allocations and user support operations. For more information about Blue Waters: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/ For more information about XSEDE: https://www.xsede.org/