Merge pull request #93 from CHTC/jstathas-patch-2

Create 2024-05-19-campus-onboarding.md

2024-05-19-campus-onboarding.md

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+---
+title: “Becoming part of something bigger” motivates campus contributions to the OSPool
+
+author: Bryna Goeking
+
+publish_on:
+  - osg
+  - path
+  - htcondor
+  - chtc 
+
+type: user
+
+canonical_url: "https://osg-htc.org/spotlights/campus-onboarding.html"
+
+image:
+  path: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/ospool-con-map.png"
+  alt: Map of institutions contributing to the Open Science Pool (OSPool). 
+
+excerpt: A spotlight on two newer contributors to the OSPool and the onboarding process.
+
+banner_src: "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/ospool-con-map.png"
+banner_alt: Map of institutions contributing to the Open Science Pool (OSPool). 
+
+---
+
+*A spotlight on two newer contributors to the OSPool and the onboarding process.*
+
+A campus’ motivation to contribute computing capacity to the [Open Science Pool](https://osg-htc.org/services/open_science_pool.html) (OSPool), 
+an internationally recognized resource supporting scientific research, can be distilled down to the desire to "become part of something bigger," 
+says OSG Campus Coordinator [Tim Cartwright](https://www.cs.wisc.edu/staff/cartwright-tim-2/). The “something bigger” refers to national cyberinfrastructure. 
+By sharing idle, unused capacity with institutions nationwide, contributors enhance the OSPool and contribute to the science executed by researchers
+utilizing this pool.
+
+<figure class="figure float-end" style="margin-left: 1em">
+  <img src='https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/cartwright-headshot.jpeg' height="240" width="190" class="figure-img img-fluid rounded" alt="Tim Cartwright, OSG Campus Coordinator.">
+  <figcaption class="figure-caption">Tim Cartwright. <br/></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+Approximately 80% of OSPool member schools donate capacity to the OSPool after receiving a Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) grant from the
+[National Science Foundation](https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/campus-cyberinfrastructure-cc) (NSF), which requires dedicating 20% of 
+computing capacity to a larger entity like the OSPool. Campuses choose the OSPool to provide this capacity, in part, because it is a readily implemented 
+approach to meet this requirement without impeding research happening on-campus. Leading the onboarding efforts, Cartwright and OSG staff have developed
+a straightforward, fairly easy-to-implement approach for campuses who wish to contribute capacity. Cartwright describes the growth of the OSPool as “an 
+incredible boom” since 2020. In the past year, about [70 institutions](https://osg-htc.org/services/open_science_pool/institutions) have contributed to the OSPool.
+
+A closer look at the journey of two new OSPool members, [Montana State University](https://www.montana.edu/) and  [The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor](https://umich.edu/) 
+illustrates the motivations and experiences of campuses when integrating some of their capacity into the OSPool.
+
+**Montana State University**
+
+[Coltran Hophan-Nichols](https://www.montana.edu/uit/rci/people/), Director of Systems and Research Computing at Montana State, approached the OSG Consortium before 
+applying for a Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) grant. Familiar with the OSPool, he knew it would be a logical choice to fulfill the 20% requirement.
+
+Along with growing student interest in HPC and HTC, Montana State needed to provide new computational resources for fields such as quantum science, artificial 
+intelligence and precision agriculture that were expanding rapidly. Hophan-Nichols knew that the OSPool could augment these much-needed resources for researchers 
+while allowing Montana State to give back capacity that would otherwise sit idle. “We pursued the OSPool because it provides national-level access while being flexible
+[with allocations],” Hophan-Nichols said. “We’re able to contribute significant capacity without impacting what researchers here can do.”
+
+“The integration itself is a relatively simple process,” Cartwright said, consisting of two meetings with the campus staff and Cartwright, plus OSG Operations team 
+members. The first meeting is a “kickoff,” where Cartwright and the campus staff talk through the technical aspects of integration. Much of the work occurs between
+the two meetings, with campus staff setting up access to their cluster and OSG staff preparing connection and service configuration. The second meeting is the actual
+integration to the OSPool, which involves setting up new OSG services to connect the site and manually verifying correct operations.
+
+During the integration meeting, the OSG team verifies that access to the site works as expected, that manual tests succeed and that the end-to-end automated 
+processes function. To alleviate safety concerns, Cartwright explains that connections into the campus system are limited to one common service (SSH) and even 
+then, only to one computer within the campus. All other networks are established from within the campus to external systems. “We have tried to make it as 
+minimally intrusive as we possibly can to work with individual campuses and what their security teams are comfortable with,” he said.
+
+Regardless of how much is done to prepare, some hiccups occur. Montana State “had to make minor tweaks to configuration changes, which ultimately sped up transfer 
+for OSPool and local transfers,” Hophan-Nichols said. The OSG Operations team and Cartwright also try to identify common issues and troubleshoot them before the integration.
+
+After making sure that connections were working and jobs were starting to run, Montana State kept its contributed capacity small to ensure everything was 
+working properly. Since then, Hophan-Nichols has worked with Cartwright to scale up availability. When they first joined, they were contributing fewer
+[than 1,000 jobs](https://gracc.opensciencegrid.org/d/uZoiT7FVz/open-science-pool?from=now-90d&to=now&var-interval=$__auto_interval_interval&var-project=All&var-institution=All&var-Filter=OIM_Facility%7C!%3D%7CLangston%20University&var-Filter=OIM_Facility%7C%3D%7CMontana%20State%20University) 
+per day. Now, they are contributing up to 181,000 jobs per day and over 2.53 million jobs in total from January through March.
+
+“It’s been mutually beneficial,” Hophan-Nichols said. “There is next to no impact on the availability of capacity for local researchers and we still
+have a significant chunk of resources we’re able to contribute to the OSPool.”
+
+**The Michigan HORUS Project**
+
+The [HORUS](https://horus-ci.org/) Project, a joint effort among the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (U-M), [Merit Networks](https://www.merit.edu/),
+[Michigan State University](https://msu.edu/) and [Wayne State University](https://wayne.edu/) (WSU), integrated some of their computing capacity into 
+the OSPool in January 2024. The HORUS regional compute project, building upon the previous [OSiRIS](https://www.osris.org/) project, exists to grow statewide 
+computing and storage capacity, as well as contribute to open capacity. [Shawn McKee](https://micde.umich.edu/member/shawn-mckee/), a Research Scientist at U-M, 
+and his colleagues at Merit and WSU secured a CC* grant to create HORUS and begin contributing capacity to the OSPool. “We had been planning to join for a while, 
+but we managed to get everything operational earlier this year,” he said.
+
+ <figure class="figure float-end" style="margin-left: 1em; width: 250px;">
+  <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CHTC/Articles/main/images/horus-logo.png" class="figure-img img-fluid rounded" alt="HORUS logo." width="250px">
+  <figcaption class="figure-caption">HORUS logo, inspired by the Egyptian god Horus. Created by Michelle David of Michigan State University, courtesy of HORUS website. <br/></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+HORUS project team members faced unique technical challenges trying to combine their existing statewide system with the broader OSPool. Between the initial meeting 
+and the onboarding, McKee and his colleagues established a secure transfer node for the OSG Consortium to use. Similar to Montana State, the HORUS project engineers
+have a strong background in research computing which made the integration straightforward. In the end, connecting via SSH jump hosts and routing jobs to all three 
+campuses only took 40 minutes. “Pretty quickly, ‘Hello World!’ worked right away and users could start using it,” McKee recalled.
+
+McKee also values the OSPool for its ability to smoothly fulfill the 20% requirement for their CC* grant. Beyond this, the OSPool offers more capacity to researchers 
+and accesses capacity from the HORUS project that would otherwise sit idle. “It was great to have the OSG Consortium come in and start utilizing large memory and 
+compute nodes that were only lightly loaded,” McKee said. “There was significant idle time that now the OSPool can use.”
+
+Across the HORUS project, McKee identified at least four researchers interested in using idle resources in the OSPool and is excited to keep growing campus involvement. 
+At U-M, [PI Keith Riles](https://osg-htc.org/projects.html?project=Michigan_Riles) uses the OSPool for work in gravitational physics. Through the OSPool, Riles has 
+run over 200,000 jobs across 52 facilities. At WSU, [PI Chun Shen](https://osg-htc.org/projects.html?project=WSU_3DHydro) uses the OSPool for work in nuclear physics,
+utilizing its capacity to run over 13 million jobs across 41 facilities.
+
+Once campuses are onboarded, OSG staff continue to collaborate with campus personnel. Beginning in February, they introduced OSG Campus Meet-Ups, a weekly 
+campus-focused video conference where campus staff can talk and learn from each other or OSG staff. [Throughput Computing](https://chtc.cs.wisc.edu/events/2024/01/throughput-computing-2024)
+and [OSG School](https://osg-htc.org/school-2024/), two events in the summer, also offer in-person opportunities for campus staff to visit OSG staff and other campuses on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus.
+
+**Prospective Campuses**
+
+The NSF CC* program provides unique access to resources and funding to improve campus research. CC* applicants can receive a letter of collaboration from one 
+of the [PATh](https://path-cc.io/) PIs for submission. For more information, 
+visit the [PATh website instructions](https://path-cc.io/services/research-computing/#let-the-path-team-help-with-your-proposal).