Cyberinfrastructure Requirements and Best Practices

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Cyberinfrastructure Requirements and Best
Practices

• Lessons from a study
• of TeraGrid

Ann Zimmerman Research Assistant Professor UM
School of Information OGF Workshop, May 27, 2009
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Outline

• Background
• Challenges
• People
• Methods used
• Analysis
• Conclusions

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Background Learning from TeraGrid

• NSF-funded study to examine
• The TeraGrid collaboration
• user needs and requirements
• impact on research practice outcomes
• education, outreach training activities
• Research Team
• Tom Finholt, PI Ann Zimmerman, co-PI
• Magia Krause, PhD student

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Key Questions User Needs

• What factors affect users computing needs and
  requirements?
• What factors affect users' behavior as it relates
  to their use (or non-use) of TeraGrid/HPC?
• How are the needs of users expected to change
  over the next five years?

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Key Questions Continued

• Where do users currently spend time that does not
  count as doing science?
• What research questions do they want to answer
  but currently cannot? What are the barriers?

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Data Collection

• June 2006-May 2007
• 7 site visits, including 4 TeraGrid sites
• Interviews (n90)
• Participant observations
• User workshop
• Document analysis and review
• Surveys
• Survey of current TeraGrid users
• Surveys of tutorials at TG 06 TG 07

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TeraGrid Planning Process

• The goal of the planning process was to
• develop options for delivering TeraGrid resources
  and services
• based on the diverse needs of science and
  engineering communities
• http//www.teragridfuture.org/

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Challenges

• Heterogeneous users
• Potentially thousands of users
• Distributed environment

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People included in the study

• Current TeraGrid users
• Target TeraGrid users
• Non-users
• Science gateway developers
• Cyberinfrastructure experts
• TeraGrid personnel

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Methods
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Workshops

• Strengths
• Learn by seeing users interact
• Gain both broad detailed information
• Relatively efficient
• Challenges
• Require careful creative planning (pre- and
  post-workshop)
• Invite 3-4 times as many people as you want to
  participate in the workshop

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Interviews

• Strengths
• Gain detailed information
• Information informs survey development
• Challenges
• Time-consuming (to conduct to analyze data)
• Resources limit the number of people who can be
  interviewed

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Category Definition Number of interviewees
TeraGrid Users Individual Researchers Individuals associated with a project that had a TeraGrid allocation at the time of the interview 26
TeraGrid Users Science Gateway Developers Individuals who on a day-to-day basis spend some portion of their time working on a project designated as a TeraGrid Science Gateway 27
TeraGrid Personnel Individuals employed by one of the TeraGrid RP sites who have a formal or informal role in the TeraGrid project 26
Non-TeraGrid Users of HPC Resources Individuals who use HPC computing resources other than TeraGrid 3
Cyberinfrastructure Experts Individuals with extensive knowledge of high-performance computing 4
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Survey

• Advantages
• Findings are generalizable across a larger
  population
• Inexpensive (in not in person time)
• Challenges
• Developing a good survey is hard
• Getting a good response rate takes a lot of effort

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Participant Observation

• Advantages
• Learn about all the factors that affect the
  ability to serve users
• Learn about user needs from a variety of sources
• Challenges
• Time-consuming
• Capturing and analyzing data

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findings
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Components of User Behavior

• The nature of the research problem
• Alignment between infrastructure and scientific
  practice
• Computational readiness
• Ease of use

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Achieving Transformative Science

• Easy things can be show stoppers
• Many complexities to manage
• virtual organization
• diverse user needs
• changes in science

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Conclusions

• Different methods provide different kinds of
  information
• Involve more than users in your study
• Current methods are effective, but time-consuming
  and resource-intensive
• New methods required. For example, mine and
  analyze sources of information (wikis, user
  support logs and databases, user sites)

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More information

• TeraGrid evaluation study reports Planning
  Process workshop reports
• http//deepblue.lib.umich.edu (browse for
  documents by Ann Zimmerman)
• Other TeraGrid Planning Process materials
• http//teragridfuture.org

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Acknowledgments

• TeraGrid
• Research participants
• NSF grants OCI-0602525 and OCI-0724300

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Contact me!

• Sorry I couldnt be here!
• Contact me at
• asz_at_umich.edu
• http//www-personal.si.umich.edu/asz/index.html