Campus Bridging - many means

2013-07-25T15:13:18Z

This week at XSEDE 13, Scott Michael presented an example of Campus Bridging activities with Mark Lynch's project making use of mlRHO. Scott and his collaborators identify a number of activities that helped the Lynch lab bridge from campus resources at Indiana University to XSEDE resources. These included:

* Indentifying that the team had big data needs, rather than HPC needs
* Requesting an allocation and creating a scalability study
* Adapting code to run with XSEDE Scheduler environments (they helped the team move from hundreds of small serial job submissions to small numbers of BigJob submissions)
* Profiling code to identify points for improvement - Lynch's team made adaptations to the code in order to carry those out

Scott's team was able, with not a lot of effort, to provide considerable improvement to the Lynch lab's analyses. Code improvements carried out by the user team resulted in a 50x speedup. Many of the activities involved improving the users' understanding of XSEDE processes and letting them know about technologies (BigJobs for submission, Vampir for code profiling) that helped them get the job done.

Campus bridging is in many instances the art of pointing the way to resources that already exist in a way that allows users to understand the benefits they can attain. I think there are a lot of opportunities for finding potential XSEDE users and projects that involve just this sort of connection that includes some advocacy, some documentation, information sharting, and some project-specific interactions with users.