While the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program has a large number of returning researchers and educators, the program also welcomes many new people each month. If you’ve used ACCESS resources before, you may already know which supercomputer to use or which storage or software is best for your work. But if you’re new to the program and were just awarded your allocation, the choices might feel overwhelming. That’s why ACCESS staff created several tools to assist you when choosing your resources: The Resource Catalog, the Resource Advisor and the Software Documentation Service.

The Resource Catalog and Advisor

The Resource Catalog is straightforward. You can use this tool to sort through the many resources available using filters like AI or specialized support capabilities. This “library” of resources is very helpful to researchers who have a strong idea of how to approach their project needs. But what if you’re not sure what you need? Sometimes you need a more active guide to help you pick your resources.

The ACCESS Resource Advisor (ARA) functions as a guided questionnaire to help narrow your choices to those that would best support your project. Everything from “Have you used a supercomputer before?” to “Which scientific libraries and software packages do you need?” is included in the short questionnaire. Once you’ve filled it out and submitted it, you get a list of resource options. The list even includes the wait times if a resource is particularly popular.

While ARA may seem like a simple tool, many details needed to be researched before it was built. Sandesh Lamichhane is one of the tool developers. Lamichhane began as one of ACCESS’s student team leaders and has since joined the ACCESS team as a systems engineer from the University of Kentucky.

“We started working on the Resource Advisor project when I was a student,” said Lamichhane. “Everyone on the team, including me, was involved in researching different RPs [Resource Providers], coding different parts of the application and designing questions.”

ACCESS staff hope a tool like the ARA makes people feel less intimidated by including high-performance computing (HPC) resources in their research project, even if it’s the first time they’ve ever tried it. “The main goal of the ACCESS Resource Advisor is to assist researchers new to ACCESS (or research in HPC environments in general) in identifying the ACCESS resource(s) that suit their needs,” explained Lamichhane. “There are many resources on ACCESS, and for each, there are tens if not hundreds of pages of documentation. Sifting through all of that and identifying what is important to them is a tough task. That’s why we created the ARA. Instead of approaching it from a resource perspective of ‘this is what we have,’ we approached it from a researcher’s perspective of ‘this is what I need.’ In keeping with that, researchers can go to the ARA and answer a few questions about what they need, and get a recommendation that suits the type of research they are doing.”

Staff working on the ARA were keenly aware that they needed to make the tool approachable. They specifically tried to avoid using too much jargon, and when jargon is used, helpful descriptions are included to ensure the person answering has a baseline understanding of what is being asked. But that doesn’t mean only new users will find it helpful.

“We keep questions direct and answerable while providing helpful links and next steps for new researchers,” said Lamichhane. “Researchers only need to answer the questions that are relevant to them, or that they have an answer for. A researcher who is already using an ACCESS resource and realizes they need a GPU with a lot more memory (VRAM) can simply answer only the GPU question, select the type of GPU and VRAM they need, and the ARA provides them with a list of resources that meet those needs.”

The ARA is designed to be approachable and helpful to new researchers while also being informative and useful to the existing ones.

–Sandesh Lamichhane, ACCESS

While the ARA is already a success, the ACCESS team continues to innovate, ensuring the tool adapts to meet the community’s evolving needs.

“There have already been hundreds of recommendations made by the ARA, and we are always looking to improve the ACCESS Resource Advisor,” said Lamichhane. “In the past, we added specific GPU and VRAM information as well as average system wait times when we saw that more and more users were asking questions about this information. Looking ahead, we plan to expand screen reader support for the ARA and to continue adding new resources and resource information as the needs of researchers and the ACCESS community evolve.”

The Software Documentation Service (SDS)

The SDS is a collection of documentation about the various software applications available through ACCESS resources. For instance, if you were working on a project that could benefit from Alphafold, the SDS would tell you which resource has that application installed. To ensure the SDS was easy to use, the ACCESS team that deployed it standardized software names and included information most helpful to people looking for applications useful for their project, such as core features and relevant descriptions of the software.

“The SDS is designed with two main goals in mind,” said Lamichhane. “The first is helping researchers identify which resource has the software they need so that they can make a more informed choice when applying for allocations or transferring their credits. The second goal is to expose researchers to the breadth of software available to them on different ACCESS resources and help them identify potential new software for their research.”

The team has integrated the SDS with the Resource Advisor tool, so researchers will receive recommendations not only on the type of HPC that would work best for their project, but also on which software would be helpful. But Lamichhane and his team also made it easier to discover all the applications on ACCESS resources that might help a researcher in a particular domain, not just the one they search for.

“If a researcher is experimenting in a particular field and is interested in identifying other software that may meet their needs, they can filter/search the table by their research discipline (or relevant keywords) and quickly see the list of software that matches their criteria,” said Lamichhane. “By viewing the “DETAILS” section for each software, they can quickly see the core features of the software as well as links to the software webpage, documentation, tutorials/user guides and other important information.”

The teams building these tools continue to refine them as feedback comes in, with plans to create more robust screen reader support and to build more nuanced research disciplines, making it easier to find applications pertinent to specific domains. They’ve even developed a standalone version of the SDS tool that any institution can use.

“It provides the same look and feel of the SDS used by ACCESS, with a few extra features (such as support for software installed within containers), as well as our curated set of information about each software, all with very little setup required,” said Lamichhane. For those interested in using the tool, you can submit a help ticket to connect with the SDS development team.

Now is the perfect time to jump into ACCESS if you haven’t before. We’re continuing to build the tools you need for a better, more streamlined HPC research experience. If you’re a researcher looking to power your research with HPC at no cost to you, you can get started with the ACCESS program here.