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Welcome to CaRCC

CaRCC – the Campus Research Computing Consortium – is an organization of dedicated professionals developing, advocating for, and advancing campus research computing and data* and associated professions. Current focus areas include building community among research computing and data professionals,(see the People Network), connecting the broader research computing and data ecosystem, professionalization and workforce development, and defining stakeholders and shared value propositions for the community at a time of accelerating change.

More info here:https://carcc.org/about/

* Research computing & data involves people, scholarship, and resources… (more…)

Join the EPSCoR CI Working Group exploring CI/RCD access for emerging and under-funded institutions!

Greetings, CaRCC members, from all of us in the newly formed EPSCoR CI Working Group (WG)! Our work centers around recognition that increased access to cyberinfrastructure (CI) and associated best practices is the next challenge for emerging and under-resourced institutions. The National Science Foundation recently funded an effort (award #2033483) designed to boost awareness, communication, and partnerships using CaRCC-driven assessment and planning tools. Led by the University of Hawai’i, in collaboration with institutional partners from Alaska, Mississippi, Montana, and Nevada, the project advocates for broad use of the Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model (RCD CM) assessment tool across the nation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdictions and other emerging or under-resourced institutions (interested? Contact us). Assessment data will be used by participating institutions in training efforts centered on CI strategic planning and partnership development. Assessment and training activities will culminate in a workshop to be held in conjunction with the NSF EPSCoR National Conference in Portland, Maine, May 22–25, 2022. An open access report, publication and related outreach activities will be made available to share findings and planning and partnership initiatives and opportunities. Check back on the working group site to keep up with our work.

CaRCC Activities at PEARC21

Greetings to members of the Campus Research Computing (CaRCC) Communities!

The PEARC21 Virtual Conference (July 19-22) is almost here. Be sure to attend the many great workshops, tutorials, presentations, and panels from persons in the community. And here are some of the CaRCC-related activities you won’t want to miss:

Town Hall

Panel: Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) Town Hall
Wednesday July 21st, 9:20 AM – 10:50 AM PDT
Thomas Cheatham, University of Utah; Dana Brunson, Internet2; Ruth Marinshaw, Stanford University; Lauren Michael, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Claire Mizumoto, UC San Diego; Patrick Schmitz, Semper Cogito; Scott Yockel, Harvard University

This panel will gather CaRCC leaders and community members to discuss recent products and significant activities that CaRCC has supported as well as new initiatives for 2021 and beyond. CaRCC is always interested to hear the concerns of our community and their ideas for what CaRCC (in partnership with other community organizations) can do to better support RCD Professionals.

RCD Capabilities Model

Workshop: Building a Strategic Plan for your Research Computing and Data Program
Monday July 19th, 8:00 am – 11:00 am (PT)
Dana Brunson, Internet2; Doug Jennewein, Arizona State University; Claire Mizumoto, UC San Diego; Patrick Schmitz, Semper Cogito; Scotty Strachan, University of Nevada, Reno

This workshop will gather Research Computing and Data (RCD) professionals to learn leading practices for developing effective strategic plans for their Research Computing and Data programs. Attendees will discuss the range of RCD strategic planning models across the community, and approaches to building a strong strategic planning practice.

Paper: Assessing the Landscape of Research Computing and Data Support
Tuesday July 20th 9:50 AM – 10:20 AM PDT
Patrick Schmitz, Semper Cogito

We describe the first Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model Community Dataset, aggregating the assessments of 41 Higher Education Institutions. This Community Dataset provides insight into the current state of support for RCD across the community and in a number of key sub-communities. The dataset shows stark differences between Public and Private institutions, between institutions with a larger and smaller share of national funding, etc.

BoF: Assessing and communicating cyberinfrastructure readiness at EPSCoR and under-resourced institutions
Tuesday July 20th, 11:15 AM – 12:15 PM PDT
Scotty Strachan, University of Nevada, Reno; Venice Bayrd, Montana State University; Patrick Schmitz, Semper Cogito; Dana Brunson, Internet2; Pips Veazey, University of Maine; Gwen Jacobs, University of Hawai’i

This BoF, which is part of a series of EPSCoR-focused engagement events for 2020-2022, brings together RCD Capabilities Model Working Group members and research technology support personnel from NSF-EPSCoR institutions to review ongoing challenges to assess and communicate institutional cyberinfrastructure (CI) readiness, discuss current model engagement efforts, provide feedback to the Model development process, and brainstorm potential cooperative CI efforts across the EPSCoR program.

RCD Professionalization

BoF: Quantifying the Research Computing and Data Professional Community for Attracting, Retaining, and Diversifying RCD Professionals
Wednesday, July 21 • 11:00am – 12:00pm
Christina Maimone (Northwestern University), Scott Yockel (Harvard University), Amy Neeser (UC Berkeley), Ashley Stauffer (Penn State University), Kimberly Grasch (University of Chicago), and Timothy Middelkoop (Internet2)

Participants in the National Science Foundation Virtual Workshop on the Research Innovation Workforce for Cyberinfrastructure identified recruiting and sustaining a diverse and inclusive workforce as a key challenge for the future of the RCD field, yet no systematic data is currently available on the current composition of the RCD workforce. A breakout group from this workshop joined the CaRCC RCD Professionalization Working Group, and set out to better understand quantitatively the state of RCD staffing across the United States by designing, testing, and implementing an RCD workforce survey tool and using that to conduct a national survey. During the Birds of Feather, the working group will provide an overview of the current state of this work and solicit feedback from the audience on a number of topics.

Emerging Centers (People Network)

Workshop: Refining Your Research Computing Pitch
Monday, July 19 • 12:00pm – 3:00pm
Jane Combs, University of Cincinnati; Richard Knepper, Cornell University (Emerging Centers track coordinators)

This PEARC workshop is for professionals (center leaders, facilitators, faculty champions, etc) of existing or emerging research computing organizations (even those “one-person shops”) to get feedback on and develop their communication materials. We hope through this workshop to provide a clearing-house of template materials that will make campus outreach easier for research computing professionals, which can be reviewed and improved by participants over time.

July People Network/RCD Community Calls and RCD Survey

Greetings, members of the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) People Network and beyond!

Before you mark your calendars, I want to make sure you saw the opportunity to participate in a study of the Research Computing and Data Workforce. Please also share this with others on your teams and relevant communities:

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network Calls. For handy calendar entries, please try the CaRCC Events Calendar.

We’d also like to highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

Finally, we have brief information about CaRCC and the People Network. If you’re not on our mailing lists, please fill out our Join the People Network form

CaRCC People Network Calls:

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

Digital Preservation and Access at Scale: Managing the HathiTrust Digital Library, discussion facilitated by Aaron Elkiss (HathiTrust)

Tue, July 6, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT/ 8a HT

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items comprising over 1PB of digitized images and OCR text. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. This presentation will give an overview of HathiTrust, the data we hold, and the services we provide. It will then describe our storage architecture, our workflows for managing data coming into the repository, our strategies for ensuring long-term preservation of this material, and conclude with some of the unmet challenges of data management that HathiTrust faces.

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)

Building Teams with Graduate Student Research Facilitators

Thur, July 8, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT/ 8a HT

There are many approaches to building teams to work directly with researchers in order to facilitate their data and computing needs. One approach is to hire graduate student consultants who are situated as researchers themselves in specific domains. Please join us for a presentation from Northwestern University and the University of California Berkeley, two universities who take this approach. First we will hear from an organizational perspective and then directly from grad students who are on these teams about the types of projects students work on, defining the work and setting expectations with faculty, recruitment and hiring, and securing funding.

Presenters:

Heather Amato, University of California Berkeley
Amy Neeser, University of California Berkeley
Dan Turner, Northwestern University
Colby Witherup Wood, Northwestern University

Emerging Centers Track (third Wednesdays)

We will pause for the month of July for the PEARC21 Conference, July 19 – 22.

Systems-Facing Track (third Thursdays)

We will pause for the month of July for the PEARC21 Conference, July 19 – 22.

And please also note these additional community opportunities (in no particular order):

RCD Capabilities Model Office Hours: July 14, 11am ET and July 27, 2pm ET (2nd Wednesdays 11am ET and 4th Tuesdays at 2pm ET)

July 1, 1pm ET: Internet2 Community Voices Series: Sustaining Integrated Solutions for Accelerating Science with Science Gateways with Sandra Gesing, Marlong Pierce, Mike Zentner, Kyle Chard, and Nancy Maron.

July 8, 12pm ET: US Research Software Engineers Monthly Community Call. Please see the Get Involved page for more information.

July 15, 3pm ET, Xpert Network Panel: Best practices for Computational and Data-intensive (CDI) Research.

July 16, 2021, 2pm ET, CI Engineering Lunch & Learn:: University of Michigan Software Interns – “Developing perfSONAR plugins with pScheduler’s Plugin Development Kit & Latency in the cloud: OWAMP & NATs”

July 19-22: PEARC21 Virtual Conference

July 27, 2pm ET: IAM Online: CILogon: Your Researchers’ Link to Cyberinfrastructure Resources with Jim Basney, NCSA.

General Track Call Information:

Interested members of the People Network need not subscribe to a particular track to participate in calls. Additional details for track members, including notes documents and any pre-call activities, will be distributed ahead of the call via the email lists and other communication channels within each track.

The CaRCC (Campus Research Computing Consortium) People Network, aims “to foster, build and grow an inclusive community (termed the ‘People Network’) for campus CI, research computing and data professionals.” If you have received this email NOT via CaRCC’s People Network, and you would like to join the People Network, which includes Researcher-facing, Data-facing, Systems-facing, Emerging-Centers, and other tracks, please fill in our mailing list request form.

All calls will take place within the same Zoom room distributed via email. Please join the People Network (link just above) or contact help@carcc.org for details.

New NSF award for Research Computing and Data Resource and Career Center

We’re delighted to announce NSF funding for a pilot CoE to build upon the work of several CaRCC working groups and advance support for RCD Professionals.

The new Research Computing and Data Resource and Career Center will create tools, practices, and professional development resources to support individuals and institutions. The main areas of emphasis include:

A more robust and sustainable implementation RCD Capabilities Model and a new Community Dataset portal.
Conducting an RCD Professional Staffing survey and sharing the results
Advancing the adoption of the HR Job Family Framework
Curating leading practices for staff professional development, and for involving students in RCD/workforce development

The RCD Resource and Career Center portal will gather these and related tools and resources together to support the community. We will place strong emphasis on helping to bridge the gap for smaller institutions that are struggling to get RCD programs started to support their researchers.

We are also excited to continue the work together with the various organizations that currently support RCD professionals and coordinate our respective work to provide a clear voice advocating for the profession.

Read the full announcement on the Internet2 website.

June Line-up of CaRCC People Network and RCD Community Calls

Greetings Community!

Please mark your calendars for our upcoming People Network Track calls for the month of May, with Zoom details below. For handy calendar entries, please try the CaRCC Events Calendar.

We’d also like to highlight a number of calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

Tuesday, June 1^st, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

Open Science Framework Integrations discussion facilitated by Eric Olson, Center for Open Science.

Eric Olson of the Center for Open Science will discuss the Open Science Framework and new integrations with the framework. The OSF is a free, open platform to support your research and enables collaboration, data management and sharing. The goal is to meet researchers where they work. Third party integrations enable researchers to work in other platforms such as Google Drive, Box, or Dropbox, and connect all the project related content under one resource. New integrations for tools such as OneDrive for Business will be released soon.

Please note that the HathiTrust talk has been rescheduled for July.

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)

We will pause for the month of June for the 2021 Virtual Residency Summer Workshop for Research Computing Facilitation, June 7 – 11. Sessions cover introductory to advanced topics, one need not attend all sessions, and registration is free. We encourage all to attend.

Emerging Centers Track (third Wednesdays)

Wednesday, June 16^th, 12pm ET/ 11am CT/ 10am MT/ 9am PT/ 7am HT

Speak above the noise. In the age of over communication via many channels, one common need among research service providers, particularly Research Computing Centers, is reaching their audience and getting the word out that their services exist. At the June EC call, we will have an interactive brainstorming session identifying the best communication channels, best delivery methods (slides, handouts, webinars…) and key items which should be included in communication materials that are used to provide the first communication to faculty, students and administrators to familiarize them with research computing resources available at our institutions. The outcome of this session will provide inputs to the PEARC ’21 Workshop: Refining Your Research Computing Pitch, discussion facilitated by Jane Combs, Rich Knepper

Systems-Facing Track (third Thursdays)

Thursday, June 17^th, 11a ET/ 10a CT/ 9a MT/ 8a PT << NOTE TIME CHANGE FOR JUNE!!

Two unique approaches to developing CUI Compliant Systems, discussion facilitated by Carolyn Ellis, Purdue University; and Erik Deumens, University of Florida

Carolyn Ellis from Purdue University and Erik Deumens of the University of Florida will present on their unique approaches to the challenges of supporting controlled unclassified information (CUI) in their respective academic setting.

And please also note these additional community opportunities (in no particular order):

June 7^th – 11^th: The 2021 Virtual Residency Introductory/Intermediate/Advanced Workshop. We highly recommend this free, excellent, in-person and virtual conference for anyone interesting in RCD facilitation skills. And also as many in the community who attend and participate in researcher-facing calls are presenters and contributors. There’s NO PREREQUISITE other than an interest in helping researchers with their computing-intensive/data-intensive research. Registration is now open.

June 24^th, 1p ET / 12p CT / 11a MT / 10a PT, EDUCAUSE RCD June Open Call. For more information on the RCD group and joining this and future calls, please see the Research Computing and Data Community Group web page.

June 22^nd, 11a PT/ 12p MT/ 1p CT/ 2p ET (4^th Tue each month) & 2^nd Wed 8a PT/ 9a MT/ 10a CT/ 11a ET: Office Hours for The Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model. Have questions about how to get started Or are you already working with it and just want to discuss the process, or a particular aspect of the assessment tool? Join us to get help, ask your questions, and share your experiences!

June 10^th, 12p: US Research Software Engineers Monthly Community Call. Please see the Get Involved page for more information.

General Track Call Information

The CaRCC (Campus Research Computing Consortium) People Network, aims “to foster, build and grow an inclusive community (termed the “People Network”) for campus CI, research computing and data professionals.” If you would like to join the People Network, which includes Researcher-facing, Data-facing, Systems-facing, and other tracks, please fill in the form at http://bit.ly/join_carcc_people_network.

All calls will take place within the same Zoom room distributed via email. Please join the People Network (link just above) or contact help@carcc.org for details.

Announcing the V1.1 Release of the RCD Capabilities Model

Internet2, CaRCC, and EDUCAUSE are pleased to announce that there is a new version of the Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model (RCD CM) just in time for you to complete your Institutional assessment and contribute to the 2021 RCD CM Community Dataset!

The Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model allows institutions to assess their support for computationally- and data-intensive research, to identify potential areas for improvement, and to understand how the broader community views Research Computing and Data support.

What’s new in the v1.1 release?

In response to community feedback, we have simplified a few things to make it easier to access and complete your institutional assessment:

A simpler Access Request form requires less information to complete. We’re now using the 2018 Carnegie Classification data to get your institution type (R1, R2, etc.), minority serving status, etc.
A number of users felt the Local Weight/Relevance column was confusing, so we removed it, and incorporated a simpler variant on this elsewhere.
Many users felt that the Multi-Institutional Collaboration answers weighed too heavily in the computed coverage. We updated the calculations to reduce the impact of this question, and to give a boost (extra credit!!) to institutions that were sustaining or leading collaborations for a given topic.

The bulk of the Model and the questions remain essentially the same as in v1.0, so if you’ve attended one of our workshops or webinars, it will still look very familiar, and you can happily discuss your experience with everyone who completed an assessment in 2020!

Why should we contribute our RCD CM Assessment to the 2021 Community Dataset?

We’re so glad you asked! Contributing institutions help build the Community Dataset, and enrich the resulting picture we have of our community. You will also get an individualized Benchmarking report that compares your assessment to the community, and segments of the community (R1s, R2s, Public or Private institutions, etc.). Finally, you get access to the anonymized, aggregated dataset, if you really like digging into data.

Sounds good – how do we get our copy and complete the assessment?

First, go to the new Access Request Form and fill it out. That will create an individualized copy of the v1.1 RCD CM Assessment tool for your institution. Then, read the Introduction and Guide to Use, and gather your team to complete the assessment. You can get help from the RCD CM working group by emailing capsmodel-help@carcc.org, or subscribe to the capsmodel-discuss@carcc.org discussion list (click here to join) to hear how other institutions are completing their assessment, and using it as part of strategic planning. You can also get help by joining our RCD CM Office Hours.

Here’s a timeline suggested by folks who worked on assessments last year:

In May: Get your copy and review the Guide. Think about who should be on the team that will complete the assessment (including, e.g., partners in central IT and/or the library). Your team can be just a few people (at smaller and emerging programs) or you could build a team with specialists for each facing.

In June: Your teams should meet to discuss the assessment, fill out most of it. Identify specific questions that may need additional input, and who can help with them.

In July: Review your assessment, discuss with your advisory board, and mark priorities for attention. We’re also holding a Workshop at PEARC21 on Strategic Planning using the Model. Watch the website for details!

In August: Submit your assessment to the 2021 Community Dataset (details to follow this summer).

In Fall/Winter 2021: Receive your Individualized Benchmarking report, the Contributors’ detailed Community Dataset report, and the full dataset if you’d like to dig deeper.

What if we’ve already started with the original version of the Assessment?

Not a problem! It is largely the same, so just get a copy of the new one (as described above), and fill it out. With a little care you can even copy your answers over from the old spreadsheet (See our Notes on copying from a v1.0 RCD CM Assessment to a V1.1 Assessment).

Feel free to contact us if you want help with this to ensure your data is transferred correctly.

2021 RCD Capabilities Model Office Hours

Have questions about how to get started with the Research Computing and Data Capabilities Model? Or are you already working with it and just want to discuss the process, or a particular aspect of the assessment tool? Join working group members and your colleagues in the community at one of our upcoming Office Hours to get help, ask your questions, and share your experiences!

Office Hours for 2021 are scheduled for the:

2nd Wednesdays of each month for 1 hour at 11am ET (new)

4th Tuesday of each month for 1 hour, at 2 pm ET.

Those dates are:

April 27
May 25
June 22
July 14 and 27
August 11 and 24
September 8 and 28
October 13 and 26
November 10 and 23

For details on how to join, email the RCD CM working group at capsmodel-help@carcc.org, or subscribe to the capsmodel-discuss@carcc.org discussion list.

May 2021 People Network Calls

Greetings, everyone. We hope your Spring is groing well thus far on this last day of April.

Please mark your calendars for our upcoming People Network Track calls for the month of May, with Zoom details below. For handy calendar entries, please try the CaRCC Events Calendar.

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

Data Feminism: A discussion of Intersectional Data, discussion facilitated by Professor Catherine D’Ignazio

Tuesday, May 4, 2021 at 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists–and others who rely on data in their work–to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind?” These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, this talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can help to challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; it will explain how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems; and why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” The goal of this talk, as with the project of data feminism, is to model how scholarship can be transformed into action: how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices.

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)

Workflow Tools for Portable, Reproducible Data Analysis

Thursday, May 13 at 1pm ET/ 12pm CT/ 11am MT/ 10am PT/ 7am HST

Workflow managers are tools that can be used to orchestrate steps in data preparation, analyses, and visualization that can be deployed on local computers, HPC/HTC clusters, and cloud environments. These steps can be formalized as pipelines, made reproducible, and used to scale. As the landscape continues to mature, join us for a discussion on the current state of these systems and how these will help your research. After an introduction to workflow standards and tools, including reasons for using them, our speakers will present several use cases in research highlighting workflow tools such as SnakeMake and NextFlow.

Emerging Centers Track (third Wednesdays)

Emerging Centers Reflecting Back and Looking forward, discussion facilitated by Jane Combs and Rich Knepper

Wednesday, May 19 at 12pm ET/ 11am CT/ 10am MT/ 9am PT/ 7am HT

We’ll be discussing the Emerging Centers calls so far (18 of them!) and identifying what members want to discuss in the coming months. We will be sending out some pre-meeting materials to help prompt our memories of prior talks and ideas for future discussion. Track chairs will also discuss the upcoming PEARC workshop activity on “Refining your Research Computing Pitch”.

Systems-Facing Track (third Thursdays)

Clusters in the Sky: How Canada is Building Beyond Iaas Cloud with Magic Castle, discussion facilitated by Jeff Albert, University of Victoria / Compute Canada, and Félix-Antoine Fortin, Université Laval / Compute Canada

Thursday, May 20th at 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

During this session, we will tell the story of the evolution of Canadian IaaS research cloud services. We will cover users’ needs for tools that help them marshal computing resources into functional platforms. As a proposed solution to these needs, we will present project Magic Castle that takes general purpose cloud resources and makes them into useful scientific toolkits. Finally, we will also discuss how the infrastructure and tools initiatives are evolving together in order to meet the increasingly specialized needs of researchers.

General Track Call Information

The CaRCC (Campus Research Computing Consortium) People Network, aims “to foster, build and grow an inclusive community (termed the “People Network”) for campus CI, research computing and data professionals.” If you have received this email NOT via CaRCC’s People Network, and you would like to join the People Network, which includes Researcher-facing, Data-facing, Systems-facing, and other tracks, please fill in the form at http://bit.ly/join_carcc_people_network.

People Network Calls, April 2021

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to Spring and April… No Joke!

Please mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network remote Zoom meetings. For handy calendar entries please try the CaRCC Events calendar.

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

Digital Scholarship Platforms and Workflows – HathiTrust Research Center and Model of Models
Eleanor Koehl (HathiTrust) and Erin McCabe (University of Cincinnati)
Tuesday, April 6, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT/ 8a HT

HathiTrust is the largest non-profit digital library in the world, and roughly 2/3 of the collection is not available for human reading. This presentation will discuss how the HathiTrust Research Center leverages compute resources at Indiana University to make text data from the HathiTrust Digital Library available for text data mining. HTRC services attempt to meet the needs of scholars with a range of skill levels, who use a variety of research methods.

UC’s Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) has developed its own platform for text mining and visualization of large-scale unstructured language datasets. This presentation will provide a demonstration of the platform in addition to reviewing topic modeling concepts that form its primary visualizations. Additionally, we will look at 1-2 analytical approaches to the platform’s output, as well as cover some of the DSC’s work / challenges with data curation, parallel modeling, and working with researchers across disciplines.

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)

On Measuring the Impact of Training
Presentations by Kari Jordan (Carpentries), and Julie Wilson Rojewski and Astri Briliyanti, CyberAmbassadors
Thurs, April 8th, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT/ 8a HT

On previous Researcher-Facing calls, we’ve had the opportunity to discuss topics relating to measuring impact and improving training. And as discussed in the Leading Practices of Facilitation, “training & education” is one of the major pillars of our efforts. Many of us provide training opportunities and struggle to define and measure “impact” or “success” — is it short terms gains (quality scores for the class & instructors, reduced support burden, and acclimating users), long term considerations (effectiveness of training programs, building relationships, promoting awareness and participation), and does it depend on the kind of training (professional skills, technical topics)? Or are we confounding these, complicating both the objectives and outcomes?

April’s call will showcase two “case studies” of measuring training impact, where each presenter will talk about their programs, define “impact”, and explain their approach to measuring this. Please also join us by contributing to our pre-talk survey: What challenges do you currently face in measuring training impact? And what successful strategies have you tried?

Emerging Centers Track (third Wednesdays)

New Resources Available to the National Research Community: Jetstream 2, Bridges 2, and Anvil
Wednesday, April 21st, 12pm ET/ 11am CT/ 10am MT/ 9am PT/ 7am HT

Representatives from Indiana University, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and Purdue University will discuss the new systems at each of these sites and their capabilities offered to the national research community. All of these resources will be available to researchers nationwide via the XSEDE project allocations system.

Systems-Facing Track (third Thursdays)

Experiences and Advice for Large and Small Data Centers – Cooling
Thursday April 15th, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT/ 8a HT

Our panel will discuss experiences managing cooling (heat) in data centers – from large scale systems to clusters in closets. The brief presentations will include experiences designing and managing cooling for their infrastructure. Our panelists will take questions from participants and discuss options. Any questions about power/security will be collated for a future session.

General Track Call Information

Interested participants need not subscribe to a particular track to participate in calls. However, additional details for track members, including notes documents and any pre-call activities, will be distributed ahead of the call via the email lists and other communication channels within each track.

All calls will take place within the same Zoom room distributed via email. Please join the People Network (link just above) or contact help@carcc.org for details.

The CaRCC People Network aims “to foster, build and grow an inclusive community (termed the “People Network”) for campus CI, research computing and data professionals.” If you have received this information NOT via CaRCC’s People Network email list and you would like to join the People Network – Researcher-Facing, Data-Facing, Systems-Facing, Emerging-Centers, and other tracks – please fill in our Join the People Network form.