Category: events

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”

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”

November People Network Calls, CaRCC Winter Party Dec. 8!

Greetings to all members of the CaRCC People Network! 

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar. We also highlight other calls from our RCD Ecosystem partners and collaborators.

And mark your calendars for the annual CaRCC Winter Party, December 8, 1-2:30pm ET / 10-11:30am PT!

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

Data-Facing Track (1st Tuesdays)

The ICPSR Research Data Ecosystem, Jeannette Jackson, University of Michigan ICPSR
Tue, Nov 1, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is an international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations. The ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community and is building the Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) funded by the National Science Foundation. The RDE will make research data accessible to broaden participation in the frontiers of scientific research. It will accomplish this goal by modernizing the existing software platform so that it supports the entire research lifecycle with an enhanced user experience to increase the ability of researchers to safely and securely access, connect, store, and manipulate data. This presentation will present some of the challenges and experience in implementation of the RDE along with details about implementation, access and usage.

Strategy and Policy-Facing Track (1st Wednesdays)

Highlights from CASC, EDUCAUSE, and the NSF Cybersecurity Summit, reports and discussion
Wed, Nov 2, 12p ET/ 11a CT/ 10a MT/ 9a PT

Continue reading “November People Network Calls, CaRCC Winter Party Dec. 8!”

October 2022: Upcoming CaRCC People Network & Community Calls

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). 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.

We’d also like to announce our new Strategy & Policy-facing Track! Many months in the works, this track is coordinated by Melissa Cragin (SDSC/UCSD) and Patrick Schmitz (Semper Cogito), and already has a robust steering committee. Many thanks to these volunteers for stepping forward, and we hope you will join us when the track has its inaugural call on Wed 10/5 at 12p.

Continue reading “October 2022: Upcoming CaRCC People Network & Community Calls”

August People Network and RCD Community Calls

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). 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.

CaRCC People Network Calls:

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

There is no call in August. Join us in September!

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)

Highlights from PEARC22, discussion facilitated by R-F Steering Committee

Thurs, August 11th, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

Back by popular demand we bring you the Researcher-Facing PEARC recap for our August call! The advanced computing community reunited in Boston for PEARC22 and during this call we will share highlights, explore what we learned, and discover some nuggets that you may have missed! If you were not able to attend the conference, this will be a great opportunity to get caught up. Please join to contribute your favorite PEARC22 moments. Drawing from what we learned at Boston, we will also dialogue around new topics for the R-F track in the coming year. 

Continue reading “August People Network and RCD Community Calls”

CaRCC at PEARC22!

In lieu of July calls for most People Network tracks, make sure to check out the below events next week at PEARC22, all of which are a direct result of CaRCC-associated efforts for the RCD community. (See the full PEARC22 schedule here.)

Sunday, July 10:

  • RCD Nexus Day (colocated event), all-day parallel sessions on student/staff workforce development and on the RCD Capabilities Model ‘Essentials’ version

Tuesday, July 12:

  • Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC) Town Hall (panel, organization update)
    10:30 AM-12:00 PM, White Hill Room
  • Understanding Factors that Influence Research Computing and Data Careers (Best Full Paper, Workforce Track; Phil Andrews Award)
    3:00 PM-3:30 PM, The Loft
  • Characterizing the US Research Computing and Data (RCD) Workforce (paper)
    3:30 PM-4:00 PM, The Loft
  • Words Matter! Progress in Promoting Inclusion through Language in Advanced Research Computing (panel; CaRCC represented among other organizations)
    5:00 PM-6:00 PM, The Loft

Thursday, July 14

  • Plenary and Awards (above RCD Career Arcs paper receiving Phil Andrews award!)
    10:00 AM-12:30 PM  Ballroom A

We hope to see you there!

Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator Training and Development (CCIFTD) BoF at PEARC22

Attending PEARC22? Don’t miss this birds of a feather (BoF) session organized by Henry Neeman (University of Oklahoma), Dana Brunson (Internet2), and Dirk Colbry (Michigan State University).

Thursday, July 14 from 9-10am in the Berkeley/Clarendon rooms

Overview: The Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator
Training and Development (CCIFTD) program is a first-of-its- kind, non matriculated certification of professional development for CI Facilitators. CCIFTD’s role is to attest to proficiency in core skills needed for facilitating computing/data-intensive research, across all Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The emphasis is on crucial professional/interpersonal skills, and complementary CI technical topics. CCIFTD focuses on establishing both (a) the set of skills and (b) a means for determining whether a CI Facilitator has these skills.

Motivation: The CI workforce suffers from a critical deficit of CI Facilitators, the CI professionals who work directly with researchers to advance computing/data-intensive aspects of their research. a vital role at many research institutions. Currently, there is a clear sense of the nature and value of the CI Facilitator role, but no well-defined set of skills agreed upon by the CI Facilitator community at large.

Methodology: 1. Determine the skills that are most valuable
for CI Facilitation, by surveying (i) experienced
CI Facilitators, (ii) CI organization leaders such as
supercomputing center directors, and (iii) STEM researchers
who use CI. 2. For each such skill, develop a badge,
specifically a training mechanism, an examination instrument,
and its scoring rubric, via pilot testing at workshops and
online. 3. Construct certification pathways, subsets of badges
that collectively merit certification. 4. Test badging methods.
5. Evaluate the CCIFTD program, both formatively during this
pilot project and summatively at the end, to improve CCIFTD
as it progresses and to determine how successful it has been.

PEARC21 report: Building a shared RCD community resource

It’s almost PEARC conference time again and we’re looking forward to the Fifth Workshop on Strategies for Enhancing HPC Education and Training on Monday, July 11, 2022. 

That made us look back and remember some of the great things that happened at last year’s PEARC conference. In case you missed it, check out this report: Towards a National Best Practices Resource for Research Computing and Data Strategic Planning. It shares the activities and findings of a CaRCC RCD Nexus workshop that brought together Research Computing and Data (RCD) professionals to discuss leading practices for developing effective strategic plans for their Research Computing and Data programs. 

The 2021 workshop had three goals:

  1. Share the experiences of universities who are currently using the RCD Capabilities Model as part of their RCD strategic planning work, including lessons learned. 
  2. Discuss the range of RCD strategic planning models across the community and identify approaches to building a strong strategic planning practice. 
  3.  Work towards the development of a shared community resource to support strategic planning for RCD, identify potential elements of such a resource and a near-term roadmap for development. 

The report documents the workshop activity and findings, including shared observations as well as recommendations. In particular, it identifies four themes that emerged as “Desired elements of a strategic planning resource”: 

  •  A repository of templates, examples, and models of strategic planning 
  •  A collection of narratives and use-cases that describe successful programs 
  •  Examples and practices for communication strategies related to strategic planning 
  •  A program of mentoring and identifying expertise related to strategic planning 

The information and insights  in this report are being used to inform what we make available in our RCD-Nexus Resource and Career Center. Want to know more? Read the full report.

June Line-Up of CaRCC’s People Network & other RCD Community Calls

Greetings to all members of the CaRCC People Network! 

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). 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.

Continue reading “June Line-Up of CaRCC’s People Network & other RCD Community Calls”

May CaRCC People Network & RCD Community Calls

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network calls (Zoom details at the end). 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.

This month, we’d like to bring to your attention a joint set of calls between the US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) and CaRCC. Hosted by each group, the calls give you, the community, an opportunity to discuss topics related to RSEs in the workforce. We hope to see you then and there.

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

Continue reading “May CaRCC People Network & RCD Community Calls”