Glossary - ACCESS

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February 26, 2023

AARC

ACCESS Allocations Review Committee is responsible for reviewing all the allocation requests that come through ACCESS and finding the right resources for researchers. AARC is composed of volunteer experts from the faculty and staff of U.S. universities, laboratories and other non-profit and commercial research organizations. All members have expertise in at least one area of computational science or engineering and serve a term of approximately three years, with the possibility of a one-time renewal.

Visit: Get Involved
See also: Allocation

ACCESS

Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Support & Services

Visit: ACCESS Home, About ACCESS, Get Started

ACCESS Allocations

The NSF ACCESS awardee for Allocations Marketplace and Platform Services, the ACCESS Allocations team helps researchers request resources and manage projects on ACCESS. The Allocations team also maintains a review panel that reviews project requests, supports Resource Providers with the information they need, and includes a DevOps team that builds and maintains web infrastructure and databases as well a develops innovative pilots to improve and support the allocations process.

Visit: About ACCESS Allocations
Read news articles: Allocations news
See also: Allocation, ACCESS Coordination Office, ACCESS Support, ACCESS Operations, ACCESS Metrics

ACCESS Coordination Office

The NSF ACCESS awardee for Coordination and Communications, the ACCESS Coordination Office (ACO) provides the structures and services to support shared governance, community input and communication, and outreach for ACCESS Allocations, Support, Operations and Metrics.

Visit: About ACCESS Coordination Office
Read news articles: Coordination Office news
See also: ACCESS Allocations, ACCESS Support, ACCESS Operations, ACCESS Metrics

ACCESS Metrics

The NSF ACCESS awardee for Monitoring and Measurement, ACCESS Metrics is responsible for the monitoring and measurement of the ACCESS cyberinfrastructure facilities.

Visit: About ACCESS Metrics
Read news articles: Metrics news
See also: NetSage, XDMoD, Cyberinfrastructure, ACCESS Allocations, ACCESS Coordination Office, ACCESS Support, ACCESS Operations,

ACCESS Operations

The NSF ACCESS awardee for Operations and Integration Services, ACCESS Operations delivers innovative integrations across the ACCESS ecosystem in the areas of operations, data and networking, and cybersecurity. Operations enables ACCESS Resource Providers, ACCESS projects and developers to seamlessly integrate and operate infrastructure into an expansive federation.

Visit: About ACCESS Operations
Read news articles: Operations news stories
See also: Resource Provider

ACCESS Resource Advisor

A tool designed to help people find appropriate ACCESS cyberinfrastructure for their research.

Visit: ACCESS Resource Advisor
See also: Cyberinfrastructure

ACCESS Support

The NSF ACCESS awardee for End User Support Services, ACCESS Support offers ACCESS users help every step of the way including a Knowledge Base, events and training, Affinity Groups, the CSSN, and longer-term support via MATCH Plus, MATCH Premier and MATCH Engagement services.

Visit: ACCESS Support
Read news articles: Support news
Also see: Affinity Groups, CSSN, Knowledge Base, MATCH

Action

Options that researchers have to manage their allocations.

Visit: How-to
See also: Allocation

Affinity Groups

Communities of practice for topical discussion. Affinity groups can compile the links to active communication channels, the most relevant documentation, news, events, and email lists for members. Resource Provider affinity groups can also be used for sending notifications of related infrastructure news.

Visit: Affinity Groups, ACCESS RP Integration Affinity Group
See also: Resource Provide r

Allocation

Your ACCESS project and resource units are what we refer to as an “allocation.” An allocation is your project’s allotted portion of a shared resource. Through ACCESS, you can get an allocation to use computing and data resources to accomplish your research or classroom objectives.

Visit: ACCESS Allocations Home, Get your first project, Resources

AMIE

Account Management Information Exchange, a communications protocol

API

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs or components to communicate with each other. It’s a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software.

Visit: Operations API
See also: CiDeR

Ask.CI

Ask Cyberinfrastructure (Ask.CI) is a discussion forum for researchers, facilitators, system administrators, students and others in the research computing community. These forums are part of the ACCESS Knowledge Base, to answer common problems and reduce the learning curve for researchers.

Visit: Ask.Ci
See also: Knowledge Base

CCEP

The Computational Science Support Network (CSSN) Community Engagement Program (CCEP) gives travel rewards for participation in community engagement, feedback forums, documentation and more.

Visit: CCEP
See also: CSSN

Campus Champions

An employee of (or person affiliated with) a college or university (or other institution engaged in research), whose role includes helping their institution’s researchers, educators and scholars (faculty, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates and professionals) with their computing-intensive and data-intensive research, education, scholarship and/or creative activity, including but not limited to helping them use advanced digital capabilities to improve, grow and/or accelerate these achievements.

Visit: Campus Champions

CI Links

Cyberinfrastructure Links (CI Links) are useful reference material added by the community to help people get started working with cyberinfrastructure and develop skills.

Visit: CI Links
See also: Cyberinfrastructure

CiDeR

The Cyberinfrastructure Description Repository (CiDeR) is an ACCESS database where information about integrated infrastructure is maintained. ACCESS websites display the information so that researchers and other members of the community can discover what resources are available. ACCESS developers can access the information through Operations APIs.

Visit: Operations APIs

CILogon

CILogon enables researchers to log on to ACCESS cyberinfrastructure (CI). CILogon provides an integrated open-source identity and access management platform for research collaborations. Federated identity management enables researchers to use their home organization identities to access research applications, rather than requiring yet another username and password to log on.

Visit: CILogon

CIP

CIP stands for Cyberinfrastructure Professionals. CI Professionals refers to the community of individuals who provide a broad spectrum of skills and expertise to the scientific and engineering research enterprise by inventing, developing, deploying and/or supporting research CI and CI users. Examples of CI Professionals include CI system administrators, CI research support staff, CI research software engineers, data curators and CI facilitators, and may also include computational research scientists and engineers who are not in traditional academic paths.

Visit: NSF’s Blueprint for Cyberinfrastructure, SCIPE/CIP Opportunities
See also: Cyberinfrastructure, SCIPE

Command-Line Interface

A means of interacting with a computer program by inputting lines of text.

Credits

ACCESS credits; universal currency that can be exchanged for resource units.

Visit: Credit Exchange and Calculator, Get Your First Project, How-To

CSSN

The Computational Science Support Network (CSSN) is an inclusive community of researchers, students, research computing facilitators, and software and systems engineers who assist researchers in using the ACCESS cyberinfrastructure.

Visit: CSSN
See also: Cyberinfrastructure

Cyberinfrastructure (CI)

Cyberinfrastructure consists of computing systems, data storage systems, advanced instruments and data repositories, visualization environments, and online services, all linked together by software and high-performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible.

Visit: About ACCESS
Read news article: Building Cyberinfrastructure for Everyone

DevOps

Software development and IT operations integration that improve a system’s life cycle.

Ecosystem

ACCESS is an ecosystem of cyberinfrastructure (CI) that comprises resources and services.

Visit: About ACCESS

Exchange

The action of requesting a conversion of ACCESS Credits to resource units.

Visit: How-To, Get Your First Project, Exchange Calculator
See also: Credits, Resources

Extension

A modification to the end date of an allocation.

Visit: How-To, ACCESS Allocations Policies
Also see: Allocation

Gateway

Community-developed integrated set of tools, applications, and data.

Visit: Science Gateways

Globus

A file transfer and sharing application that allows users to securely share and transfer data of all sizes. Globus is a not-for-profit service by the University of Chicago and is used by most ACCESS resource providers.

Visit: Globus

Infrastructure News

News about outages and significant configuration changes to ACCESS integrated infrastructure.

Visit: Infrastructure News

Innovative Pilot

Development of disruptive features to democratize the ACCESS allocations process.

Visit: Innovative Pilots

Integration News

News for Resource Providers about changes in the integration roadmaps and software.

Visit: Integration News

Integration Roadmaps

Documentation provided by ACCESS detailing how Resource Providers can integrate and operate their infrastructure in the ACCESS cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.

Visit: Integration Roadmaps
See also: Resource Provider, Cyberinfrastructure

Job

A unit of work or execution on a computing platform.

Read news article: What Gets Measured Gets Improved

Knowledge Base

Aggregated knowledge to help people use ACCESS resources and infrastructure. The Knowledge Base includes official documentation from ACCESS and Resource Providers, community-contributed CI Links, and the Ask.CI discussion forum.

Visit: ACCESS Knowledge Base
Also see: CI Links, Ask.CI, Resource Provider

MATCH Services

MATCH Engagements – Connects researchers with consultants, mentors and students to help solve research problems.

Visit: MATCH Engagements

MATCH Plus – Request a support engagement to solve a research need like expanding code, transitioning from lab computers to HPC or introducing new technologies. Get matched with a student and mentor team who will work with you for 3–6 months at no cost.

Visit: MATCH Plus

MATCH Premier – Use expert consultants to help with your compute research challenges with a 6–12 month engagement. Funded by your institution or your grant funds.

Visit: MATCH Premier

NAIRR

A shared U.S. National Science Foundation research infrastructure that would provide AI researchers and students with significantly expanded access to computational resources, high-quality data, educational tools and user support.

Read news article: ACCESS Resource Providers Join NAIRR pilot

NetSage

An open-source, privacy-aware network measurement, analysis and visualization service designed to address the needs of the research and education community.

Visit: NetSage for ACCESS
See also: ACCESS Metrics, XDMoD

NSF

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering in all 50 states and U.S. territories.

Visit: NSF

OnDemand

ACCESS OnDemand is an easy-to-use web interface for new users allowing researchers to compute on their resources from anywhere without installing client software.

Visit: ACCESS OnDemand
See also: Resources

Opportunity

A specific level of ACCESS allocation; also referred to as “project type.”

Visit: Project Types, Prepare Requests, How-To
See also: Project Type

ORCiD

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCiD) is a global, not-for-profit organization providing a code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication.

Visit: ORCiD

Pegasus

Pegasus is a workflow management system that works across various computing environments, abstracting high-level workflow descriptions from underlying execution details to enhance usability, scalability, reliability and enable error recovery and provenance tracking.

Visit: Pegasus

PI

The PI has primary responsibility for an allocated project and is expected to be aware of collaborators’ activities as part of the project, the overall consumption of allocated resources and the direction of the project’s computational efforts. PIs are responsible for submitting management requests (extensions, supplements, adding users, etc.) in support of the project, but can delegate this responsibility to co-PIs or Allocation Managers. The PI of an allocated project can be but does not need to be the PI for the supporting grant.

Project Type

A specific level of ACCESS allocation; also referred to as “opportunity.”

ACCESS supports almost any kind of open science work, no matter how (or if) the work is funded and welcomes instructors using ACCESS resources for classroom activities. Four project levels are available to choose from based on the scale of your resource needs.

EXPLORE – Great for resource evaluation, graduate student projects, small classes and training events, benchmarking, code development and porting, and similar small-scale uses.

DISCOVER – Designed for research grants with modest resource needs, Campus Champions, large classes and training events, NSF graduate fellowships, benchmarking and code testing at scale, and gateway development.

ACCELERATE – Best for experienced users with mid-scale resource needs, consolidating multi-grant programs, collaborative projects, preparing for Maximize ACCESS requests, and gateways with growing communities.

MAXIMIZE – The choice for large-scale research activities that need more resources than the limit for Accelerate ACCESS projects.

Once your project is approved you will receive ACCESS credits to exchange for allocations on a specific resource or resources.

Visit: Project Types, Prepare Requests, How-To
See also: Credits, Allocation, Campus Champions

Proposal

A composed written request for an ACCESS allocation.

Visit: Project Types, Prepare Requests
See also: Allocation

Resource Provider

A Resource Provider (RP) organization operates and maintains infrastructure resources within the ACCESS ecosystem. Resource Provider staff support researchers by reviewing progress, approving requests to use their resources, and providing infrastructure information essential to the effective and efficient use of their resources.

Visit: Resource Providers
Also see: Cyberinfrastructure, Resource Catalog

Resources

ACCESS Resource Providers provide a variety of resources for ACCESS users including compute resources, storage resources, cloud resources and specialized support.

Visit: Resource Catalog
Also see: Resource Provider

Reviewers

Those who provide their expertise and guidance on allocation proposals.

Visit: ACCESS Allocations Policies
See also: AARC, Allocation

SCIPE

SCIPE (Strengthening the Cyberinfrastructure Professionals Ecosystem) awardees are charged by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) with deepening the integration of cyberinfrastructure professionals into the research enterprise, and fostering innovative and scalable education, training and development of instructional materials, to address emerging needs and unresolved bottlenecks in cyberinfrastructure professionals workforce development.

Visit: NSF SCIPE, SCIPE Affinity Group, SCIPE/CIP Opportunities
Also see: CIP, Cyberinfrastructure

Science Gateways

A science portal or science gateway is a community-developed set of tools, applications, and data integrated through a web-based portal or a suite of applications built to use ACCESS resources. They provide access to tools used in cutting-edge research – telescopes, seismic shake tables, supercomputers, sky surveys, undersea sensors and more. These gateways often connect diverse resources and make them easily accessible, lowering the barriers traditionally required to access these resources.

Visit: Science Gateways

STEP

Student Training and Engagement Program (STEP) works to further community engagement, education and training efforts. Its goal is to encourage careers in cyberinfrastructure. STEP is intended for undergraduates or early-career graduate students.

Visit: ACCESS STEP
See also: Cyberinfrastructure

Supplement

A request action for additional credits or resource units.

Visit: How-To, ACCESS Allocations Policies
See also: Credits, Resources

Tag Taxonomy

The tag taxonomy on ACCESS Support helps people find information and opportunities related to their interests in the ACCESS Knowledge Base. Announcements, training and events, MATCH engagements, CI Links, Affinity Groups and discussion topics can all be discovered through the tag taxonomy.

Visit: Find Information About ACCESS
See also: Knowledge Base

A formal help request. Tickets are triaged by ACCESS personnel and sent to appropriate staff at the relevant Resource Provider as needed.

Visit: Open a Ticket, ACCESS Ticket System
See also: Resource Provider

Transfer

A request action to move resource units to another resource to maximize an allocation.

Visit: How-To, ACCESS Allocations Policies
See also: Allocation

Usage

Reporting on ACCESS allocations usage across the ecosystem and by individual projects.

Visit: Current ACCESS Projects, XDMoD, ACCESS Allocations Usage Map (click on “Usage”)
Read news articles: ACCESS Metrics news

XDMoD

A software utility that tracks usage and performance and quality of service of ACCESS high-performance computing and cloud resources including compute, software and storage.

Visit: XDMoD
Also see: ACCESS Metrics

XRAS

The eXtensible Resource Allocation Service (XRAS) is a software platform used by ACCESS to manage proposal review and resource allocation processes. ACCESS also offers XRAS as a hosted service to other organizations to support their separately managed allocation processes.

Visit: XRAS
Also see: Allocation

XSEDE

The predecessor to ACCESS, the National Science Foundation’s eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).

Visit: XSEDE NSF Award
Read news article: Advancing to ACCESS