ACADEMIA

TeraGrid’s Campus Champions program makes it easier for campus-based researchers and educators to access free, readily available computational resources from 11 NSF-funded national supercomputing centers and TeraGrid Resource Provider sites across the country.

Campus Champions is designed to expand and diversify TeraGrid’s user base by recruiting “computing evangelists” on individual campuses to provide local users with information and assistance on using TeraGrid resources and services. The number of institutions has ramped up steadily from one in March of 2008 to 38 today — including Hawaii and Alaska.

“Our initial plan was to engage about a dozen campuses during the first year,” said Scott Lathrop, TeraGrid’s area director for education, outreach, and training. “The ultimate goal is to get at least one Champion in every state, along with the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and more as interest and demand warrant.” Led by Kay Hunt of the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University, the effort is intended to reach not only traditional research institutions, but also minority-serving institutions and “Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research” (EPSCoR) schools.

The University of Kentucky had been working for several years to involve more people  in high-performance computing when Champions came along, according to Barbara Kucera, deputy director of the university’sCenter for Computational Sciences, who became instrumental in involving the school with the program. She said: “Now we can tell someone ‘if you want to port your code, we have somebody to hold your hand — and there are plenty of cycles available.’ ”

Roger Moye, a Campus Champion at Rice University.  Image courtesy of Carlyn Chatfield, Rice University.

An additional advantage is that assistance is likely to come from a familiar face. “The customer is far more comfortable talking to me because in most cases they know me on a first-name basis,” said Roger Moye, Linux cluster administrator in the Research Computing Support Group and a Campus Champion at Rice University in Texas.

Nurit Haspel, a post-doctoral researcher in computational structural biology at Rice, said the TeraGrid and Campus Champions have enabled her to accelerate her research into protein conformation and functionality “by a great deal.”
 
“The help of the TeraGrid Champions has been invaluable, both in writing and submitting the application for allocation and, later, in resolving specific issues with software installation and a close follow-up on my progress,” she said.

“The Campus Champions are forming a virtual organization in order to share their experiences, challenges, and successes in engaging their local communities and helping TeraGrid to improve its services for the research and education community,” Lathrop said.

The Champions will get together at theTeraGrid annual conference, June 22-25 in Arlington, Virginia, to learn more about TeraGrid and share information about strategies and opportunities.

—Greg Kline, Purdue University

 SOURCE: International Science Grid this Week http://www.isgtw.org/