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Do we have the resource to make these happen?

Some resource investments are starting to make progress already.

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Introduce ability for IRIS to accept funds from other research councils where appropriate (e.g. management of H&ES funding)

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IAM was the first step in Federation. However over the last 2 years, it has become clear that File Transfer, data management, remote job execution are now needed

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Don't we need IRIS resource integrated with a full suite of federation enabling services - accounting, Helpdesk, etc. etc.

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Dedicated funding for retiring resources sustainably

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Dedicated funding for retiring resources sustainably

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Support and development of the career pathway and a sustainable pipeline of skilled people to support outstanding infrastructure   (e.g. training, visability) 

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Support and development of the career pathway and a sustainable pipeline of skilled people to support outstanding infrastructure   (e.g. training, visability) 

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How to make prototypes more widely available to community

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How to make prototypes more widely available to community

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Links to federation activities to make them more visible.

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I would probably put Security top.

We have done a lot over the last 20 years for GridPP/EGI concerning distributed infrastructures - and we should ensure IRIS learns from this. Not just security but with other things.

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5E: flexibility underpins how IRIS infrastructure should operate - IRIS should provide infrastructure components for community to pick and choose, rather than just be a singular blob.

5A: this is ONLY second if it is a full federating objective, and not just IAM. IRIS needs full federation adoption - this must include other federation services, such as accounting services like GocDB and APEL.

5C: Not much needs to be said about prioritising security

5D: funding to drive innovation can drive huge rewards within infrastructure development

5B: This is still very important, but we had to put one last 🤷‍♂️

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5B, sustainability, is a big change in culture so will need a lot of effort to make the changes

5A lives in parallel with 5C; in both cases we have to put these at the foundation of our work, especially as we grow the scope of IRIS to include other communities

(this group was very security heavy, so acknowledging that bias)

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Ongoing funding line for prototypes at major sites

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Ongoing funding line for prototypes at major sites

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Enabling new communities to explore new hardware / innovative testbeds

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Enabling new communities to explore new hardware / innovative testbeds

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People with the domain knowledge and communities to interface with the technical knowledge to understand if it is appropreate to test an appropreate testbed.

This might be

eg. https://www.pris-managers.ac.uk/

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Professional Research Investment and Strategy Managers (PRISMs) are managers of large research, training, and network grants who have strategic responsibilities and drive the growth of the research clusters they manage. The UK PRISM network links people

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Support for effort to deliver prototypes and publicise them

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Support for effort to deliver prototypes and publicise them

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Need a PRISM to manage this - PRISM is a job category at UCL (see PRISM comment in challenges column) which is ideally suited to this kind of role.

Also relates to ExCALIBUR Hardware and Enabling software programme.

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Community needs to have strategic sight of future directions

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Community needs to have strategic sight of future directions

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Both to feed into their definition and to prepare for what is coming.

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For all of this the challenge is sufficient funding to run the core functions that make the various deployments function as a joined up infrastructure - as well as the operational funding for resources deployed at member institutes.

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Extra information that would be available to existing communities; eg for GitHub you have metrics about how often updates are made, how are issues resolved. What other metrics would be useful for IRIS?

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Need to include international angle in terms of strategic planning

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Need to include international angle in terms of strategic planning

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The way the IAM priority is phrased makes it sound like a hammer to which everything is a nail.

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The way the IAM priority is phrased makes it sound like a hammer to which everything is a nail.

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Need to catalogue assets to make sure that the availability of resources in IRIS is clear (which also helps to secure things).

Tangentially, how fine-grained can accounting be usefully made; job meta-data - how detailed do we need our taxonomies?

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5A is too focused on IAM and not on Federating as a whole.

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5A is too focused on IAM and not on Federating as a whole.

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The AAI, implemented through IAM, is a key underpinning component that drives federation but through just focussing IAM we risk not developing a full federated infrastructure. The accounting and policy components are still required.

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Rent out experimental or excess hardware to other uses (e.g. H&ES)

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Rent out experimental or excess hardware to other uses (e.g. H&ES)

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Contributing to and learn from best practice in running supercomputing centres internationally?

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Contributing to and learn from best practice in running supercomputing centres internationally?

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A global effort to bring together public computing centers
for the advancement of science and research

Supercomputing Centers

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The International Association of Supercomputing Centers (IASC) is a new association for public supercomputing centres offering public, private, and academic access to advanced computing resources that support regional advancement of knowledge and economic development.

Founded by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Science and Technology Council (STFC) Hartree Centre, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), the IASC has three strategic goals:

To examine and communicate best practices for centre management,

To study and suggest solutions for common challenges, and

To foster communication and collaboration among centres, collaborators, and users.

The IASC was officially launched at ISC22. Check out the HPCWire article.

Join us for a series of online sessions to work out ideas how IASC can best serve HPC centers worldwide.
Please come prepared with your thoughts, ideas and suggestions in the following areas:

Combining expertise to solve grand challenges

Enabling best practices in supercomputing centers

Finding efficiencies in operational processes

Identifying gaps in knowledge sharing and provision for the international HPC community

Developing skills in the international talent pool in highly specialized or niche areas

Upcoming Sessions

20:00 - 21:00 CET | Wed 07 Feb 2024
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A zoom link will be sent to registered participants.

We are representatives from computing centers worldwide- from national flagship facilities to regional computing providers - interested in merging knowledge and know-how for better operations, management and strategic planning. Some topics of interest, among many, include workforce development, NetZero policies, emerging/next-gen technologies and evolving user needs. Join us and share your own insight.

For more information, contact at helloworld@supercomputingcenters.org or join us via IASC Newsletter.

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The International Association of Supercomputing Centers (IASC) is a new association for public supercomputing centres offering public, private, and academic access to advanced computing resources that support regional advancement of knowledge and economic development.

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e.g. stuff that is near production ready, and stuff that is crazy. Perhaps low TRL stuff should be funded via research grants rather than H&ES

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IRIS RSAP form tailored for development/ innovation/ testbeds

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IRIS RSAP form tailored for development/ innovation/ testbeds

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The computational model and usage predictions may be unknown and harder to quantify when science communities are testing/evaulating innovative testbeds and hardware.

Additional guidance on applying to the IRIS RSAP template and how to deal with the unknowns.