ACCESS Introduces a New Project Search Tool

By Shira Feldman, NSF NCAR
a magnifying glass on a laptop keyboard. Meant to convey the idea of searching on the web.

Have you ever wondered about all the ways you might use your ACCESS allocation? Or maybe you’re starting a new research project and are curious about which resources peers in your research domain are using. With all the resources ACCESS has to offer, these choices can be overwhelming, especially for researchers new to high-performance computing.

Fortunately, the ACCESS website has recently introduced a helpful new tool that sheds light on the vast and formidable world of ACCESS research. The Current Projects Search offers a robust, multifactor search across all projects using ACCESS resources. Website visitors can search by researcher organization, project type, ACCESS computing resource and field of study. With almost 100 fields of study listed – from biophysics to engineering to politics to literature – the results can be very precise. 

The tool provides a window into ACCESS-fueled research, bringing visibility, transparency and inspiration to the NSF-funded program. For example, researchers can explore other projects in their areas of interest; students can pinpoint work coming out of their educational organization; research institutions can discover cutting-edge investigations into their focus areas; and the media can more easily publicize the groundbreaking research that ACCESS makes possible.

A screenshot of the project tool search application.
The new ACCESS Project Tool allows visitors to sort by resource, research domain, allocation type and organization.

Other handy site features include a dynamic map revealing where requests originate (current hotspots include Chicago and San Diego) and the My Projects page, where researchers can log in and manage their active projects and pending requests.

ACCESS Research Software Engineer Rebecca Eveland – a self-described “gigantic nerd with humanistic qualities” – designed the tool in JavaScript using a back-end powered by Ruby on Rails. Eveland dished about the tool’s origin story.

“It was a request,” she revealed, referring to the prominent feedback form that invites site visitors to submit any and all thoughts on ACCESS. “[A site visitor] said, ‘Can we have something that would show all of our projects?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great idea. Let’s run with that.’

“It’s one of those ideas that has just been kind of kicking around,” recalled Eveland, “so I took that one on.” She also remembers thinking, “We should have something on our website that helps promote what ACCESS does, and what better way to do that than to show the research that’s coming through here?”

Rebecca Eveland.

The whole ACCESS mission hits all of my high points: More science for more people, please!

–Web Developer Rebecca Eveland

It’s fitting that a tool that makes ACCESS more accessible originated with a feedback form that declares its democratizing intentions in its header paragraph: “Let us know how we’re doing and how we can improve the ACCESS allocations experience… [and] build a more inclusive experience to serve an increasingly diverse community.” 

Through the form, the Allocations team encourages stakeholder feedback and actively monitors and explores any suggestions it receives. True to the project’s official vision – to create “an open, inviting and democratized allocations marketplace” – the Allocations team is quick to act on any input for the betterment of its diverse community. 

According to Eveland, the search tool took a month or two to develop. This time frame included the web developers’ rigorous protocol to seek and incorporate feedback from site visitors, an iterative process that highlights the program’s responsiveness and flexibility. 

The testing process also led to a “secondary knock-on effect” of adding numerous search fields to make the tool “a little more customizable and useful for a variety of people,” she explained. 

Accountability was key to the tool’s design. “Our intended audience was mostly people or institutions interested in ACCESS who want to see the science coming through the ACCESS program, said Eveland. “We wanted anybody to be able to come in and take a look at what we’re doing here.”

But the project search can also be a tool for elevating good work, “a way we can celebrate and let people know, ‘Hey, your research is out there, it’s visible, people can see that you’re doing good stuff.’”

For me personally, as a developer, I love making things that make other people’s lives easier.

–Rebecca Eveland

Eveland recounted that she received a personal note from an individual who found the tool “quite useful for her job to write articles about the research in there.” About that experience, Eveland shared, “I had no idea that this was going to help somebody actually do their work. Hearing that little piece right there made me feel really good, because it’s one of the things I enjoy doing. For me personally, as a developer, I love making things that make other people’s lives easier.”

Eveland is grateful her daily job consists of transforming helpful ideas into reality. “The search tool is not just an idea that’s kicking around in my head, but it’s making this data useful for more people and that’s a fun thing for me. I just really love data.”

“Of course,” she added, “a big part of it is seeing people on the other end of it, their positive reactions.” 

When pressed on her passion for data, Eveland observed, “It’s always a hard balance: People need to know things, but it’s hard to tell them when it’s a wall of text.” 

“It’s not just data in and of itself [that I love],” she continued. “It’s taking a look at spreadsheets and spreadsheets of information, and then being able to drill into it, glean insights and provide useful things for people – to give them new perspectives or solutions to problems. That’s what I love about data science and data analysis. You can take all of this raw nothing and turn it into something that’s hopefully going to be useful for folks.”

About her role on ACCESS, Eveland confided, “Maybe some people just see this as a job. I feel it is a job, but it’s real. It feels a lot more purposeful than some of the other ‘just jobs’ that I’ve been part of.” 

Looking at her job function as a whole, she said, “This work takes my data love; it takes all of those insights that we can glean out of it and provides information out there to people who need it. And it’s just perfect.” 

Pursuing technical endeavors in order to lead with one’s heart and advance the human condition – why does that sound so familiar? Perhaps because that very spirit animates the entire ACCESS endeavor. 

“The whole ACCESS mission hits all of my high points,” stated Eveland. “More science for more people, please!”

While Eveland’s personal philosophy seems almost algorithmically well-suited to the ACCESS program’s penchant for inclusion and equality, it was pure kismet that initially ushered Eveland into the ACCESS team. 

Eveland has been employed with the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign for “a long time,” by her recall, and started at the university-affiliated National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) about five years ago. Upon her hire with the NCSA, she was assigned to the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, the predecessor program to ACCESS. “I said yes, I want to be a part of this, so they kept me on, and I’ve been here the whole time.”

Her background is in tech. “I’ve been in some form of it forever, whether it be programming, hardware, fixing computers, doing network stuff, doing audio-visual stuff, or my background from the university.” 

“I always say that ‘if it plugs into a wall, I probably did some work on it,’” she added with a chuckle.

Technology is “both my job and my hobby, so I’m always happy to answer questions. If you need some technical support, you have somebody that you can reach out to,” she offered amiably. 

Doubtless, after seeing their own website input come to life quickly and responsively, numerous stakeholders in the ACCESS community would agree.

“I feel incredibly lucky to be part of the ACCESS program in general,” Eveland stated with sincerity. “I will say that Allocations, in particular, has an amazing team that seems to care a lot, and our program managers and [other team members] are all just great people.”

She added, “The work that I did on this would not be possible if not for the other great programmers who work on our team, who help with a lot of the stuff that you don’t see, that happens in the background. So I don’t want to sit here and say I did all of this – because, besides me, there’s also an amazing team that I’m happy and very lucky to be part of.”

Click here to explore current ACCESS projects with the new search tool.

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