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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 at https://carcc.org/about/.

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

How long does it take to complete the RCD Capabilities Model?

We are often asked by community members how long it typically takes an institution to complete an assessment of their RCD support using the RCD Capabilities Model. When teams submit an assessment, we ask them about this, and so we decided to go through that data and share what we found (although we note that not all institutions provided an answer). As you might imagine, there is quite a bit of variation.

Figure 1 shows how most institutions group, with many taking less than a few person-days, but some taking quite a bit more. For the sake of presentation, we have filtered one institution that reported a team of 12 people spent 20 hours together (240 hours!).

Histogram of answers from 2020 through 2022 showing how many hours were spent completing the assessment. Contact the WG for tabular data.

Another view of this shows the individual responses in decreasing time spent (again, filtering the one outlier): 

Bar graph of all answers from 2020 through 2022 showing how many hours were spent completing the assessment. Contact the WG for tabular data.

A related question that comes up is:  “Does it take more time or less time to complete an assessment a second time?” We only have data on this from a dozen institutions, but we see two patterns that reflect stories we have heard from different participating institutions:

  1. Some teams dive in the first year, and then treat successive assessments as updates, allowing them to move through the Capabilities Model more quickly. 
  2. Other teams take a more cursory view the first time and then do a more thorough analysis when they repeat their assessment in a later year.

Figure 3 below shows the data for institutions that reported their time investment for successive assessments. Some completed assessments in all three years, and others just did two assessments. The first eight institutions generally follow the first pattern with decreasing work needed over time and the last four follow the second pattern of increased labor the second time through. Institution 1 seems to do both, increasing substantially from 2020 to 2021, and then decreasing from 2021 to 2022. 

In general, the time it will take your institution depends in part upon your organizational model: 

  • If your institution has a fairly simple or centralized organizational model, you may be able to assemble a small team and answer the questions in short order. 
  • If your institution has a distributed or federated model of service support, it may require a bit more discussion to pull together the appropriate groups, and develop a shared mental model of how those groups work together to support research. 

A second factor in the time required relates to how you are using the RCD Capabilities Model as part of your strategic planning:

  • If your goal is a simple information gathering exercise, it may be sufficient for an RCD team lead to do a relatively quick pass through the RCD Capabilities Model, and just ask a few questions of others (or just use estimates/educated guesses) for specific questions.
  • If you are using the tool as part of a broader RCD strategic planning process, you may draw together expertise from a range of groups (e.g., including HPC systems folks, Data Librarians, Information Security analysts, and others), and use the RCD Capabilities Model questions as a starting point for more in-depth discussions of service models and how teams collaborate to support research. 

Your goals may fit somewhere between these two examples. Naturally, the second approach can take quite a bit more time, but many institutions report that they got considerable value from these longer discussions, as different teams learned more about what their partners were providing and how they might better collaborate. 

In the end, you can decide how long it takes to complete an RCD Capabilities Model assessment, and in general, you will get as much out of the assessment as you put into it!

2023 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! Drop in for a few minutes or stay for the whole hour.

Office Hours for 2022 are scheduled for:

the 2nd Tuesday of each month

for 1 hour at 1pm ET, 12noon CT, 11am MT, 10am PT

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.

Join People Network Calls in March

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details via email). For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

If you’re not on our mailing lists, please fill out our Join the People Network form and join our Slack channels.

Strategy and Policy-Facing Track (1st Wednesdays)

Exploring factors that impact RCD strategy (part 2)
Wed 3/1, 12p ET / 11a CT / 10a MT / 9a PT / 7a HT
What programmatic and institutional characteristics affect how you make strategic decisions for your RCD program? We’ll hear from four RCD programs and then open a discussion on what’s similar and what’s not, and what the key factors seem to be. Is your program fully funded, are you self-supporting, or somewhere in-between? Do you have soft funding or core funding or a mix of both? Are you a centrally organized group or part of a partnership of service providers? How do your answers help determine what your programmatic priorities are and how you approach strategy? 
This is the second in the series of meetings where we can look at factors important for growth and development of your program at your institution.

Data-Facing Track (1st Tuesdays)

Continue reading “Join People Network Calls in March”

Register now! Free Virtual Residency Workshop on Research Computing

Do you want to learn how to better help researchers at your institution use research technologies? Would you like to make professional connections and meet others working in the field of research computing facilitation?

The Virtual Residency Summer Introductory Workshop on Research Computing Facilitation is designed to sharpen your skills and connect you with colleagues. Registration is now open for the free workshop that will take place on Zoom June 26 – 30.

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People Network Calls in February

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details via email). For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

If you’re not on our mailing lists, please fill out our Join the People Network form and join our Slack channels.

Data-Facing Track & Systems-Facing Track Joint Call

Towards a Data Commons​ at Harvard
Thu 2/16, 1p ET/12p CT/11a MT/10a PT/8a HT (NOTE THE DIFFERENT DATE for Data-Facing!)
Presented by:
– Mahmood Shad, Associate Director of RSE | University Research Computing | Harvard University
– Emre Keskin, Harvard University Research Data Officer
For over two years, a collaborative team from divisions and schools across Harvard University has been pursuing the idea of a “Digital Scholarship Ecosystem” to support the lifecycle of research at Harvard. The Harvard Data Commons (HDC) vision is to improve the researcher experience by automating the flow of research data from research computing environments to management, publication, discovery, and preservation environments. As a result, data integrity, provenance, and reproducibility of research data will be improved in order to meet sponsor requirements. In this talk, we will present HDC’s progress toward its major objectives and our vision for the future.

Strategy and Policy-Facing Track (1st Wednesdays)

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Nexus Day Staff and Student Workforce Development Update

During the Nexus Day event, held July 10, 2022 in conjunction with the PEARC22 conference, we held an all-day workshop to address student workforce programs and staff onboarding and workforce development practices. Although we intended to spend much of the time addressing both the staff and student workforce issues together, we quickly determined that breakout sessions specific to staff or student development efforts would be more effective and provide an excellent forum to discuss common themes and exchange ideas.

There was a general recognition that common problems and challenges span the two efforts, and there is a desire to address them collectively through shared tools and methodologies and by developing a common framework. Specifically, there was an aspiration to develop a set of learning paths, starting as early as undergraduate RCD staff and continuing through senior-level RCD professionals, to identify existing gaps in training and development. However, it was also recognized that specifics would differ between staff and student development – even though many of the tools, documentation, and basic framework may be the same. Interesting outcomes included a shared desire to develop basic materials, such as  a five-minute video on “What is a Research Computing and Data Professional?”, as well as a collective agreement on the need for and value of project management skills and training for those working in research computing and data (RCD).

Read more below about how each of these efforts is evolving:

Continue reading “Nexus Day Staff and Student Workforce Development Update”

CaRCC/RCD Nexus 2022 Retrospective

Greetings, research computing and data (RCD) professionals! As we usher in the New Year, CaRCC and RCD Nexus would like to take a moment to look back on and celebrate some of our community’s exciting accomplishments in 2022: 

To formalize and ensure community input and evaluation, CaRCC formed a new Advisory Committee and held its first annual meeting in January, 2022. The group consists of 12 members selected for their leadership and expertise within the broader RCD and cyberinfrastructure landscape. The group is instrumental in long-term planning as CaRCC continues a period of rapid growth. 

We ramped up the work of our RCD Nexus NSF Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence (CI CoE) pilot grant, and began to provide more resources than ever before to both the CaRCC and broader RCD community. The RCD Nexus website currently serves as the CaRCC Career and Resource Center. 

In May, 2022, CaRCC activity leaders, advisory committee members, and peers from across the RCD community met in Denver and joined remotely for a Strategic Planning Meeting. The meeting included discussion around CaRCC’s role in defining a framework for an RCD-CI professional society.

CaRCC has helped to facilitate the RCD Community Builders Group, a collaborative effort among nine RCD-CI organizations working together to support the community at-large. The group has been meeting monthly since March 2022. Additionally, CaRCC has formalized a partnership and collaboration with the CASC organization and had two meetings and presentations during which the groups discussed opportunities for collaboration. 

Continue reading “CaRCC/RCD Nexus 2022 Retrospective”

People Network Calls to Kick Off the New Year

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). Per usual in January, we’ll host the CaRCC Parade to provide a community update on CaRCC activities in the last year.

Mark your calendars and join via the usual People Network Zoom room (see further below). For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

If you’re not on our mailing lists, please fill out our Join the People Network form and join our Slack channels.

Annual CaRCC Parade!

Tue, 1/24, 4-5pm ET / 3-4pm CT / 2-3pm MT / 1-2pm PT
Join us for the annual CaRCC Parade, where we’ll celebrate activities and accomplishments from the past year. Call document and presentation slides are forthcoming. See you there!

Data-Facing Track (1st Tuesdays)

Casual Tuesday Community Roundtable
Tue, 01/03, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT
We want to take this month to hear a bit about what everyone is up to. This session will be a general sharing and free-form brainstorming session. We’d love to hear 3-5 minutes about projects that people are working on currently or new developments. If you’re stuck on something, feel free to bring that forward and get advice from the brain trust. We can also make breakout rooms for deeper discussions that arise.

Strategy and Policy-Facing Track (1st Wednesdays)

Canceled, replaced with Conference Proposal session (see separate email).

Continue reading “People Network Calls to Kick Off the New Year”

Make the list! Submit your RCD Capabilities Model Assessment by December 15

The 2022 Research Computing and Data (RCD) Capabilities Model Community Dataset participation window will close on December 15, 2022. Please be sure to contribute your assessment using this form before you leave for winter break!

We are grateful to the following institutions who participated in 2020/21 and would love to see your institution’s name join this year’s list:

  • Arizona State University
  • Boston University
  • Chaminade University of Honolulu
  • Cornell University
  • George Mason University
  • Kennesaw State University
  • Michigan State University
  • North Carolina State University
  • Northwestern University
  • Purdue University
  • Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Rutgers University
  • Southern Methodist University
  • Tennessee Tech University
  • The Ohio State University
  • University of Alberta
  • University of British Columbia
  • University of California Berkeley
  • University of California Los Angeles
  • University of California Merced
  • University of California San Diego
  • University of California Santa Barbara
  • University of Cincinnati
  • University of Florida
  • University of Guam
  • University of Hawaii at Hilo
  • University of Hawaii System
  • University of Hawaii West Oahu
  • University of Kentucky
  • University of Maryland, College Park
  • University of Massachusetts Boston
  • University of Rhode Island
  • University of South Carolina
  • University of South Dakota
  • University of Utah
  • University of Washington
Continue reading “Make the list! Submit your RCD Capabilities Model Assessment by December 15”

Annual CaRCC Party and People Network Calls in December

Season’s Greetings to all members of the CaRCC People Network! 

Mark your calendars for these end-of-year People Network calls (Zoom details at the end), including the December 8 Annual CaRCC Party! For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators, as these events touch many, if not all, in our community.

If you’re not on our mailing lists, please fill out our Join the People Network form and join our Slack channels.

Annual CaRCC Party!

Thu, 12/8, 1-2:30p ET/ 12-1:30p CT/ 11a-12:30a MT/ 10-11:30a PT/  8-9:30a HT
Join us for a 90-minute end-of-year party! We’ll have mixer breakout rooms, voting on the most festive apparel and Zoom backgrounds (come prepared!), prizes, games, and optional reflection discussions about the People Network and SC22. More details are captured in the call document. See you there!

Emerging Centers Track

(3rd Wednesdays; shifted for this month)
The Business Side of HPC Centers: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
Scott Yockel, PhD, University Research Computing Officer, Harvard University
Wed, 12/14, 12p ET/ 11a CT/ 10a MT/ 9a PT/ 7a HT
Note the date change to Wednesday, Dec. 14 to accommodate holiday schedules!!! We are excited to have Scott Yockel share his extensive experience with the business side of running HPC Centers.  

No calls in December for the Data-Facing, Researcher-Facing, Strategy- and Policy-Facing, and Systems-Facing tracks in lieu of the CaRCC Party! The Strategy- and Policy-Facing Track will not have its usual call in January (given the early-January timing).

Continue reading “Annual CaRCC Party and People Network Calls in December”