TeraGrid’s Efforts towardsBroadening Participation

Scott Lathrop

scott@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Broadening Participation• Goal is to engage, prepare and sustain larger and more

diverse generations of science, technology, engineering and mathematics practitioners contributing to advancing scientific discovery

• TeraGrid is broadening participation by involving under-represented communities with pro-active attention to race, gender, disability, institution, and discipline.– Institutions under-represented include K-12, 2- and 4-year primarily

undergraduate institutions, minority serving institutions (MSIs) and EPSCoR institutions

– Under-represented disciplines include humanities, arts and social sciences

– Broadening participation efforts highly leverage external collaborations and funding from other sources

Breadth of TeraGrid Activities

• Education• Outreach• Training• External Relations• Allocations• Advanced User Support Services• Science Gateways• InCommon/Shibboleth Activities

Education• Audience

– Efforts span K-20 across the country– Programs for faculty, teachers, and students

• National efforts– SC Education Program engages high school teachers and undergrad

faculty nationally– Computational Science Education Reference Desk (CSERD) - digital library

of curricular materials• Numerous local and regional efforts

– ICLCS, CMIST, MAST, TeacherTech, many more…• Next Steps

– Student workforce development paper w/OSG is being developed into an unsolicited proposal

– Seeking NSF funding for more summer workshops

Education Impact• SC09 summer workshops - 6 of 11 sites are MSI or EPSCoR

campuses: Oklahoma State U, U of Oklahoma, Atlanta University Center, U of Arkansas, Louisiana State U, Kean University; International - Turkey

• SC09 November - 88 participants: 24 from MSIs, 21 from EPSCoR, 24 from K-12 schools

• Survey of all SC Education Program participants since 2002 – Received over 170 responses from educators– Follow-up to assess depth of impact underway

• GEMS program is engaging 47 middle school girls, 15% minority students from 24 regional schools; events during the year and a week-long summer workshop - science of digital astronomy

• Institute for Chemistry Literacy through Computational Science (ICLCS) is preparing rural Illinois high school teachers - early evidence of 45% gains

Outreach• Annual TeraGrid ‘xx Conference• Campus Champions - 54 members and growing in collaboration

with OSG and Blue Waters• Pathways provides consulting, mentoring, faculty assistance among

under-represented communities• Professional Society meetings - ACS, APS, AAPT, AAAS, AGU,

EDUCAUSE, Grace Hopper, SACNAS, SC’xx, Tapia, many more…• CI Days campus outreach• Tours of facilities, seminars, speaker’s bureau• HASS received NEH grant - over 10 projects with 3M hours of time

allocated on TG systems• Society of Women Engineers student chapter outreach

• Bring campus sectors together to understand CI needs, and national/regional resources and services

• Participants include faculty, researchers, administrators, librarians, IT staff, and students

• National and regional organizations provide information on regional and national resources.

• Events held at University of Houston Downtown, University of Texas Pan American and North Dakota All-Tribes University, Howard University, Elizabeth City State University and  New Mexico Highlands University

• New NSF grant to provide support for CI Days events at 7 sites over next 15 months. Seeks to broaden the community’s understanding of CI needs, best practices, and challenges.

Outreach via CI Days

Current Campus Champions (unclassified) – 26

Current Campus Champions (EPSCoR states) – 17

Current Campus Champions (Minority Serving Institution s)-- 8

Current Campus Champions (both EPSCoR and MSI) – 3

Total Number of Campus Champions Overall -- 54

Outreach via Campus ChampionsNovember 30, 2009

Training• Live, synchronous and asynchronous training• Over 5,000 accesses of on-line tutorials per year• HPC University - repository of resources and events

spanning national and international HPC sites • Courses are incorporating on-line materials into their

curricula (high school, MSI, etc.)• Annual survey of community to assess needs and

requirements• Collaborating with Blue Waters Virtual School• Launching HPC competencies effort

External Relations2009 Science Highlights• 16 science impact stories• The work of two female PIs highlighted• Highlighted work by PIs from five

EPSCoR states

2009 Education, Outreach, and Training Highlights

• 16 EOT stories reflect evidence of broadening participation among diverse communities of practice.

• Stories focus on how TeraGrid is helping to prepare the next generation of computational scientists.

110 press releases and feature stories released in Q1-3 by TeraGrid External Relations included the work of minority and female PI’s as well as work generated by PI’s from EPSCoR states and MSI’s.

Allocations• Startup projects – nearing 800 in 2009• Education projects – 36 in 2009• 187 users from EPSCoR institutions, 18 users from MSIs

in the last quarter• Campus Champions have access to all systems to help

get users started• HASS community has 3 M hours on TG systems (NCSA,

NICS) for projects to incorporate HPC– HASS researchers eligible to request Startup projects

• Success and bringing in Startup requests is stressing the staffing and process for creating Startup projects– We’re working on streamlining the process, identifying

additional staff.

Advanced User Support Services• Providing focused advanced support to users by expert

computational scientists; selection is guided by the allocations process

• Providing consulting and training support to the community• Supporting 40-45 ASTA projects in various domain science fields,

including about ~7 Startup ASTAs• ASTA projects have multiple users involved and impact more than

45 users and in cases like NAMD the code is used by ~100s of users

• Pursuing 3-4 AUS projects spanning Molecular Dynamics codes, Materials Science codes; analyzing/benchmarking multi-core performance; publish results via TG web site

• AUS staff teach most of the training classes

Science Gateways Serve Diverse Communities• Social sciences

– SIDGrid - fundamental to a successful class with diverse student base (CS, computational linguistics, social science)

• Biology

– Ultrascan, hydrodynamic study of biological macromolecules and synthetic polymers

– Robetta, protein structure prediction, > 900 google scholar references

• GIS

– GISolve, many applications including spread of disease Special pathways funding in PY4 to

• Changes to increase utility for educators (GEON and TeacherTech)

– August workshop with learning and technology expertise from SRI

• Involve MSI students in gateway design (PolarGrid and ECSU)

– Summer internships for ECSU students at IU, ongoing development efforts involving Google gadget interfaces to data and computing

InCommon/Shibboleth Activities

• Goal to better integrate TeraGrid with Campus CI by allowing use of campus authentication to TeraGrid– TeraGrid joined InCommon as a service provider– Established https://go.teragrid.org as Shibboleth portal for TG

access via campus logon.

• Working with CIC (Big 10 schools) Identity management working group on “TeraGrid Pilot”– Focus currently on user support and incident response for

federated environments

Collaborations• Education with OSG, Shodor, NCSI, Ralph Regula, OSCER,

SC Conference, Krell, Blue Waters, etc.• Outreach with OSG, MSI-CIEC, Internet2, NLR, Blue Waters,

etc.• Training with Ralph Regula, DOE labs, PRACE, DOD Mod

program, Blue Waters, etc.• External Relations with iSGTW, HPCWire, NSF OLPA, etc.• Advanced User Support with or are part of DataNet projects,

PlantCI project, three PetaScale workshops, and the annual TeraGrid conferences

• Science Gateways with multiple communities• Numerous international collaborations - DEISA, PRACE,

Topics for Discussion• What other programs can we best learn from?• How to best engage under-represented people?

– Women, minorities and people with disabilities– Minority Serving Institutions, 2- and 4- year institutions, EPSCoR– Non-traditional fields of science - humanities, social science, etc.

• Does it make sense to focus on fewer areas rather than all of the activities? Where and how can we best focus our efforts?– How to scale the Campus Champions? Should we have Campus Champions in all

states, or regional Champions in some areas?– How to balance breadth versus depth to engage and sustain new communities?– How to best engage and support K-12 community?

• We’ve engaged 700 new users in the year….What happens as we bring in new users? How and to what extent can/should they be supported?

• How to best capture lessons learned for XD awardees?