White Paper for the Workshop on the Role of Regional Organizations in Improving Access to the National Computational Infrastructure Organization: University of Maryland, Baltimore County Authors: Don Engel (Assistant VP for Research), Jack Suess (VP for Information Technology The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university in the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area with 13,839 enrolled students, including 2,596 graduate students. According to the new federal College Scoreboard, "Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services" is the most popular set of academic programs at UMBC, with 16% of our students enrolled in these programs. UMBC has deep relationships with many government, academic and industry partners globally, but particularly in our region, the Baltimore/Washington corridor. We have departments and degree programs that are shared with neighboring institutions including and we work particularly closely with NASA on dataheavy and computationally intensive research. UMBC also has access to more exotic computing facilities, e.g. through a NASA grant to UMBC that gives us and our partner institutions remote access to a DWave quantum annealing computer. Between UMBC’s partnerships and computational focus, we are excited to see that this workshop is planning to address questions that are both nationally important and immediately relevant to our needs. UMBC is host to a range of cyberinfrastructure, including a highperformance computing user facility and a separate computing cluster used by the multisite, multiuniversity Center for Hybrid Multicore Performance Research. These programs have been supported and leveraged by a range of mechanisms including an NSF I/UCRC award, two NSF MRI awards, an NSF CC*IIE award, an REU program in high performance computing, industry support and internal investments. While these systems have been impactful for many researchers at UMBC and our partner universities, their longterm future in the context of external offerings is uncertain. UMBC hosted a regional training workshop for XSEDE, but have nonetheless seen limited exploration and adoption of external resources. We would like to use this workshop as an opportunity to reflect on what regional models might be best going forward to maximize the use of everyone’s time and resources. Topics of particular interest include: 1. The logistical and policy differences in paying for individual equipment and local shared equipment versus the costs inherent in accessing external commercial (Amazon) and federated (XSEDE, OSG) resources. 2. The staffing and training challenges – both as an activation barrier and on an ongoing basis – in helping faculty and students to explore tools which may be better for their longterm interests but include some barriers to entry which could be overcome. One approach could be to use a regional approach for training and support, although regional may or may not be the answer.
Given the fastpaced changes of available tools and technologies, the connection between teaching and research is crucial. UMBC offers coursework in high performance computing through a variety of means, including undergraduate coursework, graduate coursework, a large and formal summer REU program and individual student research experiences. Particularly for the coursework, it may be possible to leverage regional partnerships to better share the work we are already doing and to perhaps use the broader audience to draw in additional partners who are closer to the individual tools (e.g. the tool providers themselves – XSEDE, OSG, Amazon, DWave, etc.). Given UMBC’s existing relationships with a range of government, academic and industry partners, and given our location, we are particularly interested in questions relating to how multiple regional networks can partner together. The MidAtlantic is broader than a single region, and indeed hosts several regions with a history of working well together.
