The CaRCC Capabilities Model Focused Tools Committee has just released a new guide and script designed to support research computing and data (RCD) facilitators as they engage with institutions that have more modest or newly-emerging RCD programs. The guide is designed to help begin conversion about an institution’s support for research and identify key issues and opportunities for growth and strategic planning. The guide and script have already been used successfully with a number of smaller institutions, and we are pleased to share it for use by the wider RCD community.
This work was developed with support from the National Science Foundation under the RCD Nexus grant OAC-2100003.
Keep reading to learn more about how this guide was developed.
The latest release of the RCD Nexus portal provides new functionality to explore and visualize the community dataset provided by institutions that are using the CaRCC Capabilities Model and/or have contributed their capabilities assessment data. With this release, users can also benchmark their institutional capabilities coverage relative to the community of contributors. Visit portal.rcd-nexus.org/dataviz and try out the new functionality! If you have questions, complaints, or kudos, please let us know by emailing the RCD CM working group at capsmodel-help@carcc.org.
Keep reading for more details about the new functionality.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant OAC-2100003.
Join us for a presentation by Katie Antypas, office director in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure about the recently announcedNational Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot project. NAIRR envisions “a shared national research infrastructure for responsible discovery and innovation in AI.” The effort is led by the NSF and includes 10 additional federal agencies and 25 non-governmental partner organizations. The pilot assembles and provides access to technologies and tools to enable U.S. research and education including: computational, data, software, modeling, and user support resources. NAIRR “aims to ensure that AI resources and tools are accessible to the broad research and education communities in a manner that advances trustworthy AI and protects privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.”
Katie Antypas, Office Director, National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure
Prior to her role at the NSF, Antypas served at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for 17 years in a variety of roles including NERSC Division Deputy, Project Director for NERSC’s large scale High Performance Computing system acquisitions, Director of Hardware and Integration of the Exascale Computing Project, Data Department Head and User Services Group Lead. She remains a Berkeley Lab employee but is on assignment to the NSF through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act. Before coming to NERSC in 2006, Katie worked at the Flash Center at the University of Chicago on the FLASH code, a highly scalable, parallel, adaptive mesh refinement astrophysics application. She has an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and a bachelors in Physics from Wellesley College.
Members of the Engagement operations group and People Network leadership team will be hosting a new series of CaRCC Monthly Welcome events starting Tuesday, April 2 at 2pm ET. The event is designed for CaRCC newcomers or those wanting to become more involved. They will include an abbreviated overview of CaRCC groups, activities, resources, and volunteer opportunities (similar to the annual CaRCC parade) and will allow time for attendees to ask questions.
We invite and encourage group leaders and other experienced members of CaRCC to drop in on these events when your schedules allow, to introduce yourselves and your groups. Everyone is welcome!
Meeting days and times will typically alternate each month between the first Tuesday and first Thursday. The zoom link can be found on the People Network calendar or by requesting it at help@carcc.org.
The Capabilities Model Assessment Tool has been upgraded to version 2.1, which includes a range of interface improvements and institutional metadata updates. See the v2.1 Release Notes for a complete list of all changes. Highlights of the new version include:
Improved topic level display that shows average coverage values for each question in that topic, and main assessment page that shows average coverage values for each Facing
Updated progress indicator that filters out Domain Coverage questions, and eliminates them as a requirement for survey submission
Updated RCD Profile user interface that shows additional institutional metadata.
It’s that time of year again! Save the date for our 2024 CaRCC Parade on Tuesday,January 23 at 4pm ET / 3pm CT / 2pm MT /1pm PT. We will introduce CaRCC for newcomers, talk about the year ahead for CaRCC, and describe opportunities for existing and new members to get more involved. It’s a great way to stay connected with the CaRCC community or kickstart your involvement in CaRCC.
Bring your Colleagues to CaRCC!
Do you have colleagues you think should learn about and become involved with CaRCC? Have you added someone new to your team this year who may not know about CaRCC? What better way to introduce newcomers than to invite them to our2024 CaRCC Parade where they can learn more about CaRCC and hear directly from group coordinators.
Please also invite them to fill out our Join the People Network form and join our Slack channelsto get in the loop about CaRCC activities and events. You, our members, are the most powerful tool we have to reach others in RCD, and we believe your colleagues will benefit from making new connections through CaRCC.
A new report is now available detailing the accomplishments of RCD Nexus Day 2023. Funded by a Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence Pilot grant from the National Science Foundation, the workshop brought together 95 research computing and data (RCD) professionals from institutions across the U.S. The event took place on July 23, 2023, and was an official co-located event of the PEARC’23 conference in Portland, Oregon. Thirty-three attendees received travel support, which allowed them to attend both RCD Nexus Day and the full PEARC23 conference.
In addition to a combined opening session and an evening networking session, the event included two concurrent workshops. Workshop 1 was related to using the RCD Capabilities Model assessment tools and was led by Patrick Schmitz of Semper Cogito Consulting, while Workshop 2 was on the topic of staff and student onboarding and led by Claire Mizumoto of University of California, San Diego. These workshops are described in detail in the full report.
The CaRCC Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) Cyberinfrastructure (CI) working group has released a new report, Minding the Gap: Leveraging Cyberinfrastructure to Transform EPSCoR Jurisdictions, based on outcomes from the 2022 EPSCoR CI workshop series. EPSCoR is a National Science Foundation (NSF) program with “a mission to enhance the research competitiveness of targeted jurisdictions by strengthening science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) capacity and capability through a diverse portfolio of investments from talent development to local infrastructure.”
The Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) is pleased to announce thata new version of the RCD Capabilities Model assessment tool is now available and ready to use. This new web-based version of the assessment tool offers a much better user experience and is backed by a database that provides a more robust platform for data analysis. A new online data exploration and benchmarking portal will also be launched in early 2024.
Why participate in the Capabilities Model?
The Capabilities Model allows participating institutions to:
Assess their support for computationally- and data-intensive research.
Identify potential areas for improvement.
Understand how the broader community views Research Computing and Data support.
Contributing institutions help build the Community Dataset, and enrich the resulting picture we have of our community. You will get access to the benchmarking functionality on the new portal that compares your assessment to the community at-large, as well as segments of the community (R1s, R2s, Public or Private institutions, etc.; on the new portal you can define your benchmarking peer groups!). As a contributor, you will also get access to more detailed reporting functionality on the new portal, to dig into the data and create custom visualizations. Although summary data will be publicly available, only contributors will have access to the detailed data and custom visualization feature.
How to get started
Whether you are from one of the 56 institutions that have submitted past assessments, or if you are an organization interested in submitting for the first time, use our Quick Start Guide to walk you through the process of using the new tool.
And please keep reading for details on how to get help if you have questions!
