1. Campus Bridging at XSEDE
Jim Ferguson
16 December 2013 – SURAnet community
XSEDE TEOS team

2. What is Campus Bridging?
The term Campus Bridging was popularized by Edward Seidel, then of NSF. One of six NSF ACCI task forces concerned itself with C.B.
The task force came up with this definition: “Campus bridging is the seamlessly integrated use of cyberinfrastructure operated by a scientist or engineer with other cyberinfrastructure on the scientist’s campus, at other campuses, and at the regional, national, and international levels as if they were proximate to the scientist, and when working within the context of a Virtual Organization (VO) make the ‘virtual’ aspect of the organization irrelevant (or helpful) to the work of the VO.

3. What is Campus Bridging again?
“Bridging” the gap between local researcher cyberinfrastructure, campus CI, and national CI resources
Hardware
Software
Support
Outreach

4. Adequacy of research CI
Responses to asking if researchers had sufficient access to cyberinfrastructure resources – survey sent to 5,000 researchers selected randomly from 34,623 researchers funded by NSF as Principal Investigators ; results based on 1,028 responses
Stewart, C.A., D.S. Katz, D.L. Hart, D. Lantrip, D.S. McCaulay and R.L. Moore. Technical Report: Survey of cyberinfrastructure needs and interests of NSF-funded principal investigators hdl.handle.net/2022/9917

5. More on Campus Bridging
The goal of campus bridging is virtual proximity …
The biggest problems:
Not enough CI resources available to most researchers
When you go from your campus to the national cyberinfrastructure it can feel like you are falling off a cliff! That’s why you need bridging….
Campus bridging is a major priority within XSEDE

6. 6
Based on: Welch, V.; Sheppard, R.; Lingwall, M.J.; Stewart, C. A Current structure and past history of US cyberinfrastructure (data set and figures). hdl.handle.net/2022/13136

7. What is XSEDE Doing?
XSEDE is evaluating, adapting, and deploying components to enable campus bridging throughout the XSEDE service providers.
Campus Bridging involves XSEDE personnel from Architecture, Operations, Software Development & Integration, TEOS, more…
Everything going through the XSEDE engineering process.

8. XSEDE Campus Bridging
Under TeraGrid, it was never possible to buy “TeraGrid-like” cycles, and many people viewed the allocation process as very slow
XSEDE is speeding up the allocation process considerably
Rockhopper, a Tier III XSEDE Service Provider and collaboration between Penguin Computing, Inc., and Indiana University, provides cluster computation on a fee-per-cycle basis

9. XSEDE Campus Bridging 2
Even for those researchers with enough computing time, there has traditionally been little support once the allocation process is complete
XSEDE has prioritized training and documentation, as well as a number of initiatives designed to make the transition appear seamless to the user:

10. Campus Bridging services today
gridftp – service used widely for many years, a holdover from the TeraGrid project is on all major resources.
UNICORE – Grid system developed in Europe, supported and continually evolving, adopted by XSEDE for optional deployment on level 1 and 2 SPs. Many adopted already.
Globus Online – File transfer utility, approved for use on XSEDE resources. Globus Connect Multiuser going through engineering process.

11. UNICORE
Installation instructions at
Server and Client software available
Developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, one developer on XSEDE team.

12. Rocks Rolls + YUM Repository
Tools to allow cluster administrators to create a “basic XSEDE-compatible cluster software stack”
Make your cluster more XSEDE-like
Eases later transition to larger CI
Saves investment on development and updates
Allows researchers to benefit from XSEDE-wide training

13. Rocks Rolls + YUM Repository 2
Teaches students interested in HPC to operate within a context similar to XSEDE
Maintained and updated by XSEDE Campus Bridging
New cluster? Rocks ISOs can automate much of the work of setting up a basic XSEDE-like cluster

14. Rocks Rolls + YUM Repository 3
Existing cluster? XSEDE provides documentation to configure your cluster such that you can use these resources

15. GlobusOnline
Simple, Dropbox-like interface for moving files back and forth
Can be configured to connect between multiple computers and larger resources to transfer data
Screenshot courtesy of

16. Globus Online 2
Set a transfer and start it, walk away, and get a notification when the transfer is complete
During Q3 2013, GlobusOnline allowed researchers to move over 630TB of data onto the XSEDE network
That’s just ONE direction!

17. Campus Bridging Direct Support
New service – 9-5 (eastern) by to

18. Campus Bridging Pilot Program
Pilot sites at CUNY, Miami, Texas A&M, and Kansas used ‘beta’ Genesis II utilities.
Testing, reporting, feedback direct to XSEDE Operations and Genesis II team at U. Virginia
Pilot sites also tested aspects of UNICORE to submit jobs from local resources up to XSEDE resources.
Pilot program has also tested XSEDE software testing and approval process.
Program now completed, final report in draft.

19. XSEDE bridging software
software.xsede.org
UNICORE distribution
ROCKS Rolls and RPMs to build or add capabilities of UNICORE and Genesis II / GFFS software to your home cluster
Genesis II components, including GFFS, still in engineering process and not approved for deployment on XSEDE resources. Operational testing started in November.