CARC 2022 Annual Review

Center for Advanced Research Computing

Patrick Bridges Director

Fiscal Year 2022 Annual Review of Category 3 Research Centers/Institutes | October 7, 2022

Mission

To lead and grow the computational research community at UNM.

To fulfill our mission, we will:

• Provide access to high-end computing resources and associated infrastructure;

• Offer specialized expertise and technical support;

• Coordinate and collaborate with other UNM programs that support the community; and

• Grow the collaborative user community through education, workshops, and outreach events.

FY 2022 Goals and Status

• Continue to promote and improve revised CSE program – outreach to affiliated faculty and departments, develop more specializations

• Established an advisory board and held a first meeting

• This has largely been deferred due to ongoing staffing shortages

• Become an NSF XSEDE basic service provider (SP) and assess the requirements and potential benefits of further integration with NSF XSEDE services, as preparation for potential submission of NSF system acquisition and management awards.

• Deferred due to NSF switch from XSEDE to ACCESS for service management

• Develop and begin executing systems refresh plan using combination of state funds, institutional funds, and potential federal funds (e.g. NSF MRI awards)

• Launched Hopper, a condo cluster that provides general compute resources to the UNM community and also includes hardware funded by individual UNM researchers to meet support their sponsored research efforts

• Deployed refreshed storage systems for both enterprise and scratch storage in collaboration with University libraries

Membership of Advisory Committee

• Susan Atlas, Ph.D. - Research Professor, Physics and Astronomy

• Patrick Bridges, Ph.D. - Director, CARC; Professor, Computer Science

• Karl Benedict, Ph.D. - Associate Professor & Director of Research Data Services, College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences

• Mary Jo Daniel, Ph.D. - Associate Vice President for Research; Director, Faculty Research Development Office

• Jeremy Edwards, Ph.D. - Professor, Chemistry

• Hua Guo, Ph.D. - Distinguished Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Department of Physics and Astronomy

• Jane Lehr, Ph.D. - Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

• Keith Lidke, Ph.D. - Associate Professor, Physics & Astronomy

• Christopher Lippett, Ph.D. - Associate Dean for Research, Arts & Sciences; Professor, Geography and Environmental Sciences

• Monika Nitsche, Ph.D. - Professor, Mathematics and Statistics

• Marek Osinski, Ph.D. - Distinguished Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Center for High Technology Materials

• Brian Pietrewicz, MBA - Deputy CIO, Information Technologies

• Andrea Polli, Ph.D. - Mesa Del Sol Endowed Chair of Digital Media Professor, Fine Arts and Engineering University of New Mexico Department of Art and Art History

• Edl Schamiloglu, Ph.D. - Distinguished Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering; Associate Dean for Research, School of Engineering

• Gregory Taylor, Ph.D. - Director, Long Wavelength Array; Director, Center for Astrophysical Research and Technology; Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy

• Lee Taylor, Ph.D. - Associate Professor, Biology

• Katie Witkiewitz, Ph.D. - Director, Center on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse, and Addictions (CASAA); Distinguished Professor, Psychology

Date of FY22 annual review: pending

FY 2022 Highlights

• Systems Expansion

• Hopper

• Storage w/Libraries

• Associate Director hire

• Hired Professor Ylva Pihlström, Physics and Astronomy in Fall 2021

• User Meeting

• Held first user meeting in April 2022

• Gathered researchers to share how they used CARC resources in their research

• Collected user feedback via focus groups and event survey

Proposals and Awards (Last 5 fiscal years)

FY 2022 Sources of Revenue

• F&A Return

• Allocations (OVPR)

• $730,000 operating

• $175,000 Hopper support

Center Revenue Details $905,000 $38,025

FY 22 Revenue

Research Expenditures and F&A (last 5 fiscal years)

Expenditures

Total Research Expenditures for your Organization

FY 2022 Expenditures

• Office operating costs

• MMR maintenance and service contracts

• Computers, software, and parts

• Salaries, fringe & tuition

Center Expenditure Details

FY 22 Expenditures

• Annual conference funding $17,048 $42,333 $228,329

Research Center Impacts

• The OVPR funded a number of nodes in Hopper which are available for the UNM computational research community to use, free of charge

• Held 7 user training workshops and 233 user meetings

• Published 10 new videos, including user support content and CARC graduate assistant research presentations and tutorials, with 4,000 views and counting

• Held a user meeting with 30 researchers in attendance – we plan to make this an annual event

• Established an external cost model which will allow us to work with outside researchers

Return on Investment

• Served 96 PIs and 384 users, including 55 new projects

• 685,768 jobs completed

• 22,675,602 CPU hours provided

• 52 publications in calendar year 2021, in journals such as Nuclear Engineering and Design, Scientific Reports, The Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Natural Sciences, Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, Molecular Physics, Journal of Neurotrauma, Nature Chemistry, Physics of Fluids, Conservation Genetics, and Nature Materials

• Two new grant awards totaling $779,769

Support a broad range of computational research activities by the UNM community

Provide substantial computational resources to researchers free of charge

Expert user support staff

Graduate student ambassador training program

STRENGTHS OPPORTUNITIES

Utilize CSE program to expand research computing expertise on campus

Computational science workforce demand

Research and Education Funding opportunities within NSF

Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea calls

Increase collaboration with other computational units on campus (Libraries, IT)

External collaboration with Labs (SNL, LANL) and industry

Aging systems and facilities

Understaffed to meet campus demand

Building with significant security, maintenance, and utilization challenges

Lack of support for research with specialized needs or that handle sensitive data

WEAKNESSES

Staff loss to retirement, external competition

Major system or facilities failure

Decreasing price of cloud computing systems

Pandemic has pushed already short staffing into a bigger problem – hiring administrative and technical staff has been challenging, HR delays have caused us to lose candidates

THREATS

Looking Ahead to Fiscal Year 2023

• Increase user support staffing and training materials

• Assess and examine options for expanding Linux research computing support

• Continue work on data center replacement and office replacement if Galles building were to be decommissioned

• Create vision and first steps for creation of interdisciplinary UNM data science research and education programs

• Continue to address research cybersecurity and data management needs together with OVPR, Libraries and IT

Summary

• Significant increase in number of users supported and center resource usage due to effective training, support, and outreach

• New systems acquisition support this user growth and will need to continue and be augmented appropriately

• Staffing and building/facilities issues are short to medium-term challenges to be addressed

• Expanding collaborations with other UNM research computing stakeholders (e.g. Libraries) an opportunity for increasing number, quality, and capacity of research services

• Planned interdisciplinary data science research/education efforts key to fully realizing center mission