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• Create a $1 Million+ CC* proposal to meet the research, staff and cyberinfrastructure
• Needs/Wants of small, primarily undergraduate, northeast Higher Ed institutions
• To share faculty expertise (current research projects and new collaborations)
• To share staff expertise (deploy and support, sustain after grant period)
• To share unique computational capabilities in a variety of disciplines
• Establish a single, participants' wide, user directory with global access
• Provide for multiple off-site, geographically dispersed, backup storage targets
• Establish a global Data Management Plan for all institutions participation

• Data Driven Multi-Campus/Multi-Institution Model, or/and Cyber Team
• RFP mid March? More like May/June (found 2016 announcement via AdvancedClustering of 06/02/2016)

• RFI CC* (due April 5th, 2017) at https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2017/nsf17031/nsf17031.jsp
• Pull Wesleyan brain storm meeting together, scheduled for 3/21/2017

• RFP CC* at https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16567/nsf16567.htm
• Henk to find an example of somewhat larger colleges' successful proposal in 2016
  • these are all very large, we should also investigate XSEDE and NSF/Jetstream (cloud based)
  • https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1541215&HistoricalAwards=false
  • https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1640834&HistoricalAwards=false
  • https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1006576&HistoricalAwards=false
• XSEDE https://www.xsede.org/using-xsede
  • for research this involves writing XSEDE proposals to get time allocations, quarterly awarded
• Jeststream (allocates XSEDE resources) https://jetstream-cloud.org/
  • this also requires writing proposals for time allocations, half year cycles, not sure (?)

Until we have a 2017 CC* RFP announcements this is a list of random thoughts to keep track of.

• Leverage a common HPC environment among small, northeast, colleges
  • we do science too (compare to larger colleges)
• 1-3 sysadmin FTEs covering 3-6 colleges for 3 years
  • redundancy in sysadmin coverage, round robin
  • each member to assess how to provide funding past year 3
• Possible Members (underlined=informally contacted, bolded=interested party):
  • Hamilton,Lafayette,Middlebury,Trinity,Wellesley,Wesleyan,Williams
• Each member will do an internal survey of local computing and storage desires, put together 1-2 racks
  • gpu, cpu, hybrid of such, visualization, deep learning,etc…(no UPS, compute nodes)
  • infiniband enabled /home storage with ipoib, head node (both on UPS), sandbox
  • ethernet storage for backup with snapshots (LVM or rsnapshot.org) (on UPS, switches)
  • possible off site backup of data, round robin, among members
• Hardware desires/configs to be vetted for too much redundancy
  • Each site should offer something unique
  • Shared with whole community of members
  • Custom hardware requests highlight each member's area of expertise
• Leverage a common HPC deployment software stack
  • OpenHPC (openhpc.community) with shared deployment modules (CentOS 7.2/Warewulf/Slurm)
  • Application software modules to deploy per members' requirements
  • Commercial software? (License type would need to be discussed with vendors)
  • Shared skill set with experts in certain specific areas and tools
  • Facilitate classroom usage (local temp accounts recycled by semester?)
• User account creation
  • Participants can request accounts on each members' installation
  • Local accounts with request workflow or InCommon or …?
  • Collaborative non-member account requests?
• Meetings, ofcourse
  • of sysadmin group
  • of advisory group
• Data Management Plan
  • To satisfy NSF public data access policy and distribution
  • One site for all (Islandora, Dspace, ???). One members' expertise?
• …

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