Ecosystem for Research Networking

ERN Virtual All Hands - Structural Biology Session
2021-07-15 10:00 - 12:00 (America/New_York)
Cryo-EM/ET is one of the research areas where gaining a deeper understanding of the workflows, research computing and data requirements, collaborations, and challenges will enable the ERN to have the broadest impact across multiple research disciplines, pedagogical approaches, senior level college and university administrators, and other organizations within the region and beyond. We estimate that the Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET community in the Northeast comprises nearly 50 centers serving more than 800 laboratories from Pennsylvania to Maine. Single Particle Reconstruction information produced by these centers is producing transformative insights. Given the cost and value of the instruments involved, fast turnaround and efficient use of resources is key. While all centers are well equipped to deliver images from prepared samples, processing and storage of these images can present significant and unnecessary obstacles, especially for labs that do not have easy access to computing resources and expertise. The Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET microscopy labs in the Northeast have formed a relatively tight knit community, allowing for free flow of information and experience, and reducing duplication of effort, and accelerating the adoption of new techniques. This session will explore possibilities for extending this collaboration to include the community of Research Computing and Networking organizations that serve these labs and the broader impacts.

Please view the agenda here.

ERN Virtual All Hands - Policies Session
2021-07-14 14:00 - 16:00
The vision of the ERN is to simplify and incentivize multi-campus collaborations and partnerships throughout the nation and beyond that advance the frontiers of research, pedagogy, and innovation. In order to do this successfully the ERN needs to consider current university policies as well as engage with university administrations in developing a policy strategy to help us bring the vision to reality. This session aims to learn from the ERN community the impact of federated and university policies and what considerations need to be taken into account as we create new policies and procedures designed to lower barriers that allow the ease of sharing knowledge, data, infrastructure, and people.

Please view the agenda here.

ERN Virtual All Hands - Broadening the Reach Session
2021-07-14 10:00 - 12:00
The session aims to learn directly from smaller, mid-sized and under-resourced campuses on the research infrastructure capability needs of the institutions – data, supercomputers and/or other research equipment, software, and people. In addition, the session will explore developing a skilled workforce to support advanced CI and research and the potential for the Eastern Regional Network (ERN) to provide the broader community access to ACI expertise, resources, tools, events, guidance, data, and collaboration opportunities. The goal is to bring together the community thought leaders to identify challenges, opportunities, collaboration opportunities, and brainstorm on the ERN Implementation in collaboration with RENs to address the needs of smaller, mid-sized and under-resourced campuses. Results of the workshop will also be used for planning the 2021-2022 ERN BTR Working Group workshops.

Please view the agenda here.

ERN Virtual All Hands - Architecture/Federation Session
2021-07-13 14:00 - 16:00
Merging what we learned from the ERN working group meetings, workshops, and the community, our goal for the ERN has evolved into building an instrument that interconnects the research instruments on our campuses through a federated private cloud platform (OpenCI Labs), a secure but open gateway to our campus CI ecosystems, coupled with distributed specialized cloudlet nodes that provide near data computing and advanced networking capabilities placed within close proximity to a research instrument (edge cloud services). This ERN effort, driven by the needs of the Structural Biology, Materials Discovery, and Computer Science and Broadening the Reach communities, with the help from people representing all the major stakeholder groups and partner sites across the region and beyond, is focused on standing up these secure services in order to revolutionize the way the research and education communities across the nation collaborate, access research instruments, and share data, ultimately leading to new and exciting research and education endeavors. The purpose of this session is to share what we have learned since the last AHM, instrument designs, and future projects with the hope that, as a community, we find a path forward to realize the ERN vision and mission.

Please access the agenda here.

ERN Virtual All Hands - Opening Session
2021-07-13 10:00 - 12:00
The Eastern Regional Network (ERN) has been very busy since our June 2020 All Hands Meeting and are excited about sharing all of the activities with you, the ERN community. For this reason, we are pleased to announce that this year’s ERN All Hands Meeting will take place virtually from July 13 – 15, 2021. You are invited to join with the ERN community as we come together to discuss current and future ERN projects, collaborations and partnerships, the five ERN Working Groups’ efforts, future funding opportunities, future workshops, and other topics. In addition, we plan to invite several NSF Program Officers to the All Hands Meeting as well as industry partners who have been involved with several of the ERN activities.

Please view the agenda here.

Internet2 Online Virtual Event: Identifying Cyberinfrastructure Gaps for Under-Resourced Institutions
2021-04-20 14:00
Community,

The Eastern Regional Network (ERN) recently held a “Broadening the Reach” Workshop. Please join us for:

I2 Online Virtual EventIdentifying Cyberinfrastructure Gaps for Under-Resourced InstitutionsREGISTER HERE (free)

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 2 p.m. ET | OnlineRecommendations from the recent Eastern Regional Network’s “Broadening the Reach” workshop Register for this virtual event on April 20th at 2 p.m. ET, featuring the Eastern Regional Network’s (ERN) Broadening the Reach program–which strives to understand how to support resource and technology collaborations among smaller, mid-sized, under-resourced campuses in the Northeast, and how similar collaborations can be expanded in the Northeast with: *Minority Serving Institutions, *Hispanic-Serving Institutions, *Historically Black Colleges and Universities *Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research institutionsIn this virtual event you will learn about: *The Eastern Regional Network’s Broadening the Reach program *The ERN BTR December 2020 workshop results *Available resources and funding opportunities that your campus could leverage *Ways to participate with these research and cyberinfrastructure collaborations

Speakers:Dr. Forough Ghahramani, Associate Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Sponsored Programs, Edge, Inc.

John Hicks, Network Research Engineer, Internet2REGISTER HERE (free)

Dana Brunson

Executive Director for Research Engagement

Internet2

ERN Structural Biology Voice of the Customer Virtual Workshop
2021-02-11 13:00 - 16:00
The Rutgers Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine and the Eastern Regional Network are co-organizing an online workshop to solicit feedback from electron microscopists and electron microscopy facility managers regarding their information technology (IT) challenges. The goal of our Voice of the Customer exercise is to ascertain the needs of this rapidly growing community of structural biologists for enumeration in an NSF Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 application (Program Solicitation NSF 21- 505, Mid-scale RI-1).

Our proposal seeks funds to establish robust federated IT data transfer networking and data management solutions among ERN-member institutions that will enable facile and secure online access to electron microscopy facilities and the large volumes of data generated therefrom.

Electron microscopists and electron microscopy facility managers working in ERN-member institutions are strongly encouraged to register (at no cost) and contribute to the success of the Mid-scale RI-1 proposal by explaining current IT infrastructure pain points and helping to identify future enhancements for remote access and control of imaging experiments by structural biologists using institutional, regional, and national electron microscopy facilities. Interested parties from outside the ERN, including ex-US institutions, are similarly encouraged to register (at no cost) and participate. The ERN is committed to identifying IT infrastructure solutions that can be disseminated across the nation and around the world.

To participate in the ERN Structural Biology Voice of the Customer workshop, please register here. The virtual meeting information will be emailed to the address you provide in the registration form.

ERN Broadening the Reach Virtual Workshop
2020-12-10 00:00 - 2020-12-11 23:59
Many smaller, mid-sized and under-resourced campuses, including MSIs, HSIs, HBCUs, and EPSCoR institutions, have compelling science research and education activities along with an awareness of the benefits associated with better access to cyberinfrastructure resources. Yet, these schools typically may not have the resources or expertise in-house to go through the process of identifying, understanding and quantifying science drivers, understanding the cyberinfrastructure needed to support the applications; and, then provide both the technical and application support associated with matching the applications to the infrastructure, particularly when the required resources are outside of their campus environment.

We invite you and colleagues at your institution to participate in the Eastern Regional Network’s (ERN) Broadening the Reach (BTR) Workshop December 10-11 (https://forms.gle/KY1out4urW5Hqykt6). The workshop is bringing together representatives (including CIOs and/or provosts, vice presidents for research, researchers, educators, and technical support staff) from the small, mid-sized and under-resourced schools in the Northeast, including MSIs, HSIs, HBCUs, and EPSCoR institutions, along with regional (and national) cyberinfrastructure experts with the goal of improving the Eastern Regional Network’s understanding of how best to support under-resourced academic institutions in the region. To participate in the workshop, please register here for the ERN Broadening the Reach workshop (https://forms.gle/KY1out4urW5Hqykt6) .

We also invite you and your colleagues to participate in the pre-workshop survey (https://delaware.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8wFAFke835Pi0Op), developed by the ERN BTR working group, designed to help identify perceived challenges and opportunities at participating institutions, and to use the knowledge from the survey to serve as a baseline framework for workshop discussion sessions. Only members of the ERN Broadening the Reach working group will have access to the information provided in response to survey questions, and individual responses will be kept private and secure. Participants will have the opportunity to remain anonymous. Please note, please plan to take a few moments to complete the survey prior to the workshop and preferably by November 15, even if you are not able to participate in the workshop, your input is important to us.

We are seeking participation in the workshop and survey from each of the following areas: CIOs, VPRs, provosts, researchers, faculty, and research computing and Central IT technical support staff. Please feel free to forward to appropriate members of your organization.

For additional information about the workshop or survey, please contact Forough.ghahramani@njedge.net or jhicks@internet2.edu.

ERN Architecture and Federation Virtual Workshop
2020-12-02 00:00 - 2020-12-04 23:59
The vision of the federated collaboratories will require the development of many layers of abstractions ranging from hardware, networking, federation architecture, scientific workflows, and domain-specific models and tools to enable collaborative discovery. The ERN Architecture and Federation working group are focused on gathering information and discussing what the “federated collaboratory” might look like from both a hardware and software perspective as well as what federation should look like as we strive for a seamless collaborative sharing experience.

As a member of the ERN community, or attendee of the ERN All Hands Meeting in July, we invite you to participate in the Eastern Regional Network’s Architecture and Federation workshop December 2nd – 4th. The workshop is currently scheduled to cover the following topics:

authentication, authorization and accessdata storage and transfernetwork connectivityfederated infrastructuresscience driver use cases

Discussions following each session’s presentations will help in the understanding of how best to model the federated instrument promoting collaboration and scientific advancement. To participate in the workshop, please register here.

To view the workshop schedule, please follow this link.

For information about the ERN, please visit https://ec2-100-48-119-54.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

For additional information about the workshop, please contact mzink@cas.umass.edu or maureen.dougherty@ern.ci .

Virtual All-Hands Meeting: Closing Session
2020-06-11 14:00 - 16:00
Breakout session leads will give a high level overview of what was discussed in their respective sessions and the working groups formed.

All-Hands Breakout Session 6: Computer Science
2020-06-11 10:00 - 12:00
We believe that the ERN will both benefit from and serve as a testbed for Computer science research. As we strive to develop solutions focused on supporting the vision and mission of the ERN, many of the challenges the ERN will face will lead to questions that ultimately become interesting CS research projects on topics such as ontologies and knowledge representation, workflow analysis, federated AI/ML, domain-specific programming languages, to architecture, networks, systems, and security. The ERN will also become a testbed for CS experiments (Measurement Monitoring, Self Optimizing Systems) and will leverage existing NSF funded projects (FABRIC, Open Cloud, CC*) leading the way to become an instrument to connect other research instruments or platforms. In this session the focus will be on how computer science research can play an important role in defining the ERN and to form a working group to focus on the different CS related projects to be included in the Mid-Scale proposal.

All-Hands Breakout Session 5: Broadening the Reach
2020-06-10 14:00 - 16:00
Many smaller, mid-sized and under-resourced campuses, including MSIs, HSIs, HBCUs, and EPSCoR institutions, have compelling science research and education activities along with an awareness of the benefits associated with better access to cyberinfrastructure resources. These schools can benefit greatly from resources and expertise to augment their in-house efforts. This could include identifying, understanding, and quantifying the science drivers; understanding the cyberinfrastructure needed to support the applications; and providing both the technical and application support associated with matching the applications to the infrastructure, particularly when the required resources are outside of their campus environment. This session is focused on learning directly from this community on how best to support under-resourced academic institutions in the region, which happens to be a majority of the academic institutions within the Northeast. Because of the trusted relationship between smaller academic institutions and the regional network providers, the role of regionals as facilitator and user support for these smaller institutions within the ERN will also be explored during this session.A goal of this session is to form a working group focused on broadening the reach as well as creating content to be included in the Mid-Scale proposal.

All-Hands Breakout Session 4: Policies
2020-06-10 10:00 - 12:00
The vision of the ERN is to simplify multi-campus collaborations and partnerships that advance the frontiers of research and innovation. In order to do this successfully the ERN needs to consider current university policies as well as engage with university administrations (VPRs, CIOs, General Counsel, and IRB directors) in developing a policy strategy to help us bring the vision to reality. This session will give the ERN community a chance to discuss university policies and what considerations need to be taken into account as we create new policies and procedures. What needs to be in place that allows ease of sharing knowledge, data, infrastructure, and people? Sustainability, another important discussion point, as well as compliance requirements and security concerns should also be addressed during this session. A goal of this session is to create a working group focused on CI sharing policies as well as creating content to be included in the Mid-Scale proposal.

All-Hands Breakout Session 3: Materials Discovery
2020-06-09 14:00 - 16:00
Materials Discovery is one of the research areas where gaining a deeper understanding of the workflows, research computing and data requirements, collaborations, and challenges will enable the ERN to have the broadest impact across multiple research disciplines, pedagogical approaches, senior level college and university administrators, and other organizations within the region and beyond. Researchers in materials discovery are realizing that their traditional data-intensive HPC workflows are reaching the limits of spatial and temporal scales required to make deeper insights and predictions. For this reason, they are looking to new paradigms that include convergence of HPC and Machine Learning (ML) methodologies, algorithm development, and novel ways to access the data distributed across multiple institutions used in training systems as promising approaches to overcome the major computational performance limitations. Materials Discovery offers an attractive testbed for advanced cyberinfrastructure of the sort the ERN can offer through future funding opportunities such as the Mid-Scale RI-1 program and DMREF. As with Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET, this session will explore possibilities for extending collaborations to include other institutions as well as the community of Research Computing and Networking organizations and to form a working group to focus on future workshops and content for the Mid-Scale proposal.

All-Hands Breakout Session 2: Cryo-EM
2020-06-09 10:00 - 12:00
Cryo-EM/ET is one of the research areas where gaining a deeper understanding of the workflows, research computing and data requirements, collaborations, and challenges will enable the ERN to have the broadest impact across multiple research disciplines, pedagogical approaches, senior level college and university administrators, and other organizations within the region and beyond. We estimate that the Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET community in the Northeast comprises nearly 50 centers serving more than 800 laboratories from Pennsylvania to Maine. Applications of Cryo-EM span structural biology and material science. Single Particle Reconstruction information produced by these centers is producing transformative insights. Given the cost and value of the instruments involved, fast turnaround and efficient use of resources is key. While all centers are well equipped to deliver images from prepared samples, processing and storage of these images can present significant and unnecessary obstacles, especially for labs that do not have easy access to computing resources and expertise. The Cryo-EM/Cryo-ET microscopy labs in the Northeast have formed a relatively tight knit community, allowing for free flow of information and experience, and reducing duplication of effort, and accelerating the adoption of new techniques. This session will explore possibilities for extending this collaboration to include the community of Research Computing and Networking organizations that serve these labs and the broader impacts and to form a working group to focus on future workshops and content for the Mid-Scale proposal.

All-Hands Breakout Session 1: Architecture/Federation
2020-06-08 14:00 - 16:00
Realizing the vision of the federated collaboratories will require the development of many layers of abstractions ranging from hardware, networking, federation architecture, scientific workflows, and domain-specific models and tools to enable collaborative discovery. In preparation for upcoming workshops focused on gathering information to be included in the ERN Mid-Scale preproposal, this session will be an ERN community forum to discuss what the “federated collaboratory” might look like from both a hardware and software perspective as well as what federation should look like as we strive for a seamless collaborative sharing experience. Another goal of the session is to start identifying an ERN technical team who will lead the architecting/federating/software strategies for the Mid-Scale proposal.

Virtual All-Hands Meeting: Opening Session
2020-06-08 10:00 - 12:00
The NSF Mid-Scale is about the design of an instrument to support research. We propose to build an instrument to access and connect researchers and their research instruments, data sources, and associated computational capabilities through federation, a software and hardware defined “federated collaboratory,” designed to simplify multi-campus collaborations and partnerships that advance the frontiers of research and innovation. The sessions during this virtual ERN All Hands Meeting are the next step in the process of helping the ERN achieve this vision.

NSF MRI Award to UVA
2020-03-23 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Ron Hutchins is currently VP of IT at University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA.

Abstract: Ron’s focus at UVA has included growing research computing services in both the systems and the support team. Through two NSF awards (CC* and MRI) UVA has focused on high performance connectivity and protected data. The 2019 award of the ACCORD MRI grant is expanding support for computing resources for protected data, both HIPAA and CUI, for UVA and the other public universities in Virginia. Through this award, the ACCORD partners will be able to host protected data and perform high throughput and highly parallel computations on that data. A focus is being put on building a library of containers that can be reused to speed up approval of the computing environment for research. This presentation will include a brief overview of the ACCORD program and answer any questions.

The Open Cloud Testbed
2020-02-10 16:00
Speaker: Michael Zink – Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract: A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Boston University, and Northeastern University recently received an award from the National Science Foundation to construct and support a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud Testbeds such as this are critical for enabling research into new cloud technologies. This is research that requires experiments which potentially can change the operation of the cloud itself. By providing capabilities that currently are only available to researchers within a few large commercial cloud providers, the new testbed will allow diverse communities to exploit these technologies, thus “democratizing” cloud computing research and allowing increased collaboration between the research and open source communities.
Speaker Bio: Michael Zink is currently Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He received his PhD in 2003 from the Multimedia Communications Laboratory at Darmstadt University of Technology. He works in the areas of future multimedia systems, Internet architectures, and sensor networks. Dr. Zink is a senior member of the IEEE and ACM.

Chameleon: How to Build a Cloud++
2019-12-16 03:30 - 16:00
Speaker: Kate Keahey – Senior Fellow, University of Chicago Computation institute

Abstract: Chameleon is a large-scale, deeply reconfigurable experimental platform built to support Computer Sciences systems research. Community projects range from systems research developing exascale operating systems, virtualization methods, performance variability studies, and power management research to projects in software defined networking, machine learning, and resource management. What makes Chameleon unique is that it provides these sophisticated capabilities based on a mainstream infrastructure cloud system (OpenStack). In this talk, I will explain the challenges we faced in building Chameleon, lessons learned, operations experiences, and describe our packaging of the system that integrates both the developed capabilities and the operational experience and facilitates managing platforms of this kind.

Speaker Bio: Kate Keahey is one of the pioneers of infrastructure cloud computing. The Nimbus project she created is recognized as one of the first open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementations and she continues to work on research aligning cloud computing concepts with the needs of scientific centers and applications. To facilitate such research for the community at large, Kate leads the Chameleon project, providing a deeply reconfigurable, large-scale, and open experimental platform for Computer Science systems research. Kate also co-founded and serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of the SoftwareX journal, a new format designed to publish software contributions. Kate is a Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.

Building a state-of-the-art campus compute resource at Franklin & Marshall College
2019-12-02 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Carrie Rampp – Vice President and CIO, Franklin & Marshall College

Abstract: Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is building and deploying a campus cluster resource to better meet the needs of our researchers and their students who need greater access to high performance compute resources to support intensive data analysis and computation. This project provides much needed local compute nodes for F&M’s researchers and students while also contributing to the growing fabric of shared computing clusters across the country. This project contributes these new resources to the Open Science Grid (OSG) which is a national, distributed computing partnership that allows participants to share their resources with other researchers to maximize the impact these investments have on scientific research and discovery.

The Open Storage Network: Distributed Storage Infrastructure for Data-Driven Science
2019-11-04 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Alex Szalay – Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: The Open Storage Network(OSN) is a network of storage nodes distributed across the US that is designed to simplify sharing of active scientific data sets. While other uses may emerge over time, the OSN is intended initially to serve two principal needs: (1) facilitate smooth flow of large data sets between data and computing resources such as instruments, synthetic data projects, campus or regional data centers, and cloud providers; and (2) make it easy to expose long tail data sets to the entire scientific community. The current pilot deployment, which consists of CEPH storage nodes at five sites across the US, started to host and expanding set of scientific data sets in January 2020.

Speaker Bio: Alexander Szalay is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of the Institute for Data Intensive Science. He is a cosmologist, working on the statistical measures of the spatial distribution of galaxies and galaxy formation. He is a Corresponding Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received an Alexander Von Humboldt Award in Physical Sciences, in 2007 the Microsoft Jim Gray Award. In 2008 he became Doctor Honoris Causa of the Eotvos University, Budapest.

The FABRIC Testbed
2019-10-21 15:00 - 16:00
Speaker: Jim Griffoen – Professor and Director, University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences

Abstract: FABRIC is a unique national research infrastructure to enable cutting-edge and exploratory research at-scale in networking, cybersecurity, distributed computing and storage systems, machine learning, and science applications. FABRIC is an everywhere programmable nationwide instrument comprised of novel extensible network elements equipped with large amounts of compute and storage, interconnected by high speed, dedicated optical links. It will connect a number of specialized testbeds (5G/IoT PAWR, NSF Clouds) and high-performance computing facilities to create a rich fabric for a wide variety of experimental activities.

Speaker Bio: Jim Griffoen is Professor of Computer Science, Director of the Center for Computational Sciences, and Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Networking at the University of Kentucky. his research interests include future network architectures, cloud computing, programmable networks/software defined networks, network measurement and monitoring systems, experimental testbed networks, network virtualization, and network protocol design.

Atrio – Composable Cloud Computing
2019-10-07 15:00 - 16:00
Atrio Dynamically provisions applications and platforms using an intelligent scheduling and provisioning stack on top of existing infrastructure, forming an elastic edge-to-cloud computing network
