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May 21-23, Wolf Law School, Boulder CO
Tuesday, May 21
 

11:30am MDT

Lunch
Tuesday May 21, 2024 11:30am - 12:45pm MDT
Wolf Law Cafeteria

12:45pm MDT

Leveraging High-Performance Computing for Advancing Molecular Understanding of Infectious and Neurological Diseases
In the Rationally Designed Immunotherapeutics and Interfaces (RDI) Lab, we leverage high performance
computing (HPC) to drive advancements at the intersection of computational
biology, immunology, virology, and neurodegenerative disease research. Through the
integration of bioinformatics and deep learning techniques with mathematical, evolutionary,
and atomistic-level modeling, our aim is to unravel the complex molecular mechanisms
underlying disease pathology. Harnessing these molecular-level insights, our ultimate
objective is to develop innovative, clinically-translatable immunotherapies for treating a
diverse array of infectious and neurological diseases. This talk will highlight our utilization of
HPC resources to investigate a phenomenon known as viral tropism switching, engineer
novel vaccine formulations, and design small-molecule therapeutics in the context of HIV.
Furthermore, it will briefly describe our preliminary investigations into the role of key proteinprotein
and protein-ligand interactions in Alzheimer’s disease, offering insights that may
inform novel treatment strategies.

Speakers
KS

Kayla Sprenger

University of Colorado Boulder


Tuesday May 21, 2024 12:45pm - 2:00pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

2:10pm MDT

Accelerating Discoveries: Unleashing the Power of CR8DL Explore
At the 2024 Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Conference, George Slessman, CEO and founder of CR8DL, will unveil the groundbreaking capabilities of CR8DL Explore. This presentation will delve into how CR8DL Explore is set to revolutionize the landscape of computational research by providing researchers with unparalleled access to high-performance computing resources. Through an exploration of its user-friendly interface and innovative features, attendees will gain insights into how CR8DL Explore will empower researchers to accelerate their discoveries in fields ranging from biosciences to artificial intelligence. With its flexible and scalable infrastructure, CR8DL Explore will redefine the boundaries of computational research, offering a transformative platform for scientific innovation and discovery.

Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:10pm - 2:40pm MDT
Room 207

2:10pm MDT

Experiences with the NVIDIA Grace Hopper architecture in HPC systems
The NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip combines the NVIDIA Grace and Hopper architectures into a single CPU+GPU coherent memory model, with the ability to greatly accelerate data-intensive GPU workflows. A number of RMACC institutions recently acquired GH200 nodes. This thirty-minute "Birds of a Feather" will enable participants to discuss their early experiences with the GH200, or to learn from others' experiences if they are considering the Grace Hopper architecture.

The first 30 minutes will focus on user-facing aspects while the second 30 minutes will focus on system facing aspects.

Moderators
CE

Craig Earley

University of Colorado Boulder
AM

Andy Monaghan

University of Colorado Boulder

Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:10pm - 2:40pm MDT
Room 206

2:10pm MDT

DDN - “Paving the Path to Success with AI and HPC
Come learn about the importance of getting involved with AI and HPC as a way to enhance your career path.

Speakers

Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:10pm - 2:40pm MDT
Room 205

2:10pm MDT

Easier Job Array Submission with slurm-auto-array
slurm-auto-array provides users of sbatch an easier way to submit job arrays, especially when their work units are very small and/or very numerous. It reduces the Slurm scheduler's burden by aggregating many units of work into a single array task, allowing a command to be run on millions of inputs with tens of array tasks. Users supply arguments directly over stdin much like one would with parallel or xargs, which is significantly easier for users than manually mapping SLURM_ARRAY_TASK_ID onto their inputs. It has allayed the need for extensive user training on job arrays and diminished the scheduling woes that come of a user submitting thousands of jobs in a loop.

Speakers
MG

Michael Greenburg

Brigham Young University


Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:10pm - 2:40pm MDT
Room 204

2:10pm MDT

Learn how to get an ACCESS Account and Allocation
Come and learn all about how to get an account and allocation. This session is geared towards beginners and new users of HPC resources. 

The ACCESS Allocations Service envisions the nation's cyberinfrastructure ecosystem being accessible and equitably available for all researchers and educators no matter the size of the institution, the scale of the planned work, the discipline of the research, or the demographics of the requester.

Through ACCESS, you can get an allocation to use computing and data resources to accomplish your research or classroom objectives.

Speakers
NL

Nathalie Leon

University of Colorado Boulder


Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:10pm - 2:40pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

2:45pm MDT

AMD Technology for HPC & AI
Come by to learn more about how AMD leadership technology can help with your HPC and AI needs.

Speakers

Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:45pm - 3:15pm MDT
Room 207

2:45pm MDT

Add Interactive HPC, Multipoint Data Staging, Job Routing, and Multi-Cloud to your Cluster with ProjectEureka
In this presentation we will discuss how Project Eureka will provide a way to seamlessly integrate interactive applications with the extension of Open OnDemand, data-management with and high performance-AI computing with the OmniScheduler meta-scheduler as part of your HPC cluster
We will discuss how as part of Project Eureka we have extended Open OnDemand to include a project based user interface that supports project level organization and self service capabilities providing a 'Collaborate First' ethos. This interface adds new functionality, but also maintains the existing security model maintaining the per-user-nginx user sandbox model.

Additionally we will discuss the OmniScheduler integration and its design to handle capabilities such as data/results staging, dynamic scratch, and data publishing with job directives. The design also includes standard configurations that will be provided by the UI for additional data management capabilities.

In the presentation we will also discuss how Project Eureka is designed to be cross cloud including on-prem by leveraging Terraform with a new Constellation layer that programmatically generates and maintains Terraform configurations. This will ultimately provide cross platform coverage of AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure for Cloud and Slurm & K8s/Kubevirt for on-prem integrations.

Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:45pm - 3:15pm MDT
Room 205

2:45pm MDT

Experiences with the NVIDIA Grace Hopper architecture in HPC systems- Continuation
Join us for a continuation of the 2:10 session on Grace Hopper Nodes. This session will focus more on the System Administration of Grace Hopper nodes. 

The NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip combines the NVIDIA Grace and Hopper architectures into a single CPU+GPU coherent memory model, with the ability to greatly accelerate data-intensive GPU workflows. A number of RMACC institutions recently acquired GH200 nodes. This thirty-minute "Birds of a Feather" will enable participants to discuss their early experiences with the GH200, or to learn from others' experiences if they are considering the Grace Hopper architecture. Both systems-facing and user-facing aspects will be discussed.  

Moderators
CE

Craig Earley

University of Colorado Boulder
AM

Andy Monaghan

University of Colorado Boulder

Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:45pm - 3:15pm MDT
Room 206

2:45pm MDT

Orchestration of Large Scale Protein-Ligand Docking Computations
The increasing power, capacity and accessibility of modern supercomputers has enabled many ambitious projects aimed at mapping complete solution spaces for large dimensional problems. The interactome effort surveys the protein-ligand interactive landscape, employing large scale docking calculations between known structures. The orchestration of the thousands of discrete cluster jobs to implement this investigation requires the development of a versatile pipeline, consistent in preprocessing and allocation steps but also capable of provisioning larger hardware resources when required. Implementation details will be discussed along with results from the subsequent postprocessing of various computational metrics, which reveal compelling performance trends.

Speakers
TJ

Thomas Jennewein

Arizona State University


Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:45pm - 3:15pm MDT
Room 204

2:45pm MDT

Learn about the ACCESS CSSN Community Engagement Program (CCEP)
ACCESS Support is pleased to present at RMACC the refreshed CSSN Community Engagement Program (CCEP). This travel grant program has been revamped after community input to have a single reward tier with higher compensation - $3,000 - and multiple opportunities to support conference attendance: https://support.access-ci.org/ccep. Come join us to learn more about those opportunities and a "step-by-step" how to apply.

Speakers
AR

Alana Romanella

University of Colorado Boulder


Tuesday May 21, 2024 2:45pm - 3:15pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

3:15pm MDT

Break
Tuesday May 21, 2024 3:15pm - 3:30pm MDT
Wolf Law Cafeteria

3:30pm MDT

Advance and Accelerate Research in HPC & AI with Dell Technologies Innovative Solutions
Discovery and innovation have always started with great minds dreaming big. As High performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) continue to converge and evolve, they are fueling the next industrial revolution and the next quantum leap in human progress. Join Dell technologies to learn about the latest industry trends, how Dell is helping customers with the validated HPC & AI solutions on latest hardware and software platforms.

Speakers

Tuesday May 21, 2024 3:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 207

3:30pm MDT

Broadening Access and Accelerating Responsible AI Innovation Through the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot
The National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) is a vision for a shared research infrastructure that will strengthen and democratize access to critical resources necessary to power responsible AI discovery and innovation.  It will connect U.S.-based researchers and educators to computational, data, software, model, and user support resources necessary to power AI innovation and advance the AI ecosystem responsibly. The NAIRR pilot, as directed in the Executive Order on the Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence, is a proof of concept for the eventual full-scale NAIRR. The National Science Foundation, in collaboration with 10 other federal agencies and 25 industry and nonprofit partners, launched the NAIRR pilot in January 2024. The pilot will focus on supporting research and education across broad and diverse communities, while also serving as a vehicle for gaining insights that will refine the design of a full NAIRR. This presentation will describe key elements of the launch, current capabilities, and plans for the pilot.

Speakers

Tuesday May 21, 2024 3:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

3:30pm MDT

Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) on Shared Resources and the repercussions of transgressions
  1. Introduction to CUI, NIST SP 800-171, and CMMC: We will begin with an overview of CUI and the need for safeguarding it. This will include an explanation of NIST SP 800-171 in providing guidelines for protecting CUI on nonfederal systems and then discuss the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) as a framework for ensuring adequate cybersecurity practices and processes.
  2. Types of CUI in University Research: We will discuss the types of CUI universities might generate, use, or store, especially in research projects requiring supercomputer resources.
  3. Scenarios: We will walk through hypothetical scenarios where CUI might be at risk in a university setting, illustrating how NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC requirements apply.
  4. Special Considerations for AI/ML and Large Language Models (LLMs): A discussion of strategies for protecting CUI in these contexts, including data segmentation, access controls, and encryption.
  5. CUI Enclaves and Effective Scoping: We will explain the concept of a CUI enclave as a dedicated environment for handling CUI. Outline steps for effectively scoping such environments, including asset inventory, categorization, and creating network diagrams to ensure compliance with CMMC and NIST SP 800-171 standards.
  6. Responsibility and Accountability: We will lay out the roles and responsibilities within universities. Discuss how prime contractors and subcontractors are required to maintain comparable CMMC levels when handling similar types of CUI, highlighting the collaborative nature of compliance efforts.
  7. Repercussions of Non-Compliance: Detail the potential consequences of failing to adhere to CMMC and NIST SP 800-171 requirements (See FCA filings against Georga Tech & Penn State), including loss of funding, reputational damage, and legal ramifications.
  8. Conclusion and Call to Action: Reiterate the criticality of safeguarding CUI in academic research utilizing shared supercomputing resources. Encourage ongoing education, collaboration, and investment in cybersecurity to meet and exceed the standards set forth by CMMC and NIST SP 800-171.

Speakers

Tuesday May 21, 2024 3:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 204

3:30pm MDT

Alpine New User Seminar

CU Research Computing's Alpine is a free resource for RMACC members. This training is designed to give you an overview of Alpine resources, procedures, and best practices. You will learn how to get an account, log in, request allocations, store and transfer data, load software, run a job, and ask for help.


Speakers
BR

Brandon Reyes

University of Colorado Boulder
AM

Andy Monaghan

University of Colorado Boulder


Tuesday May 21, 2024 3:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 206

3:30pm MDT

Automating Research with Globus - The Modern Research IT Platform
As research data volumes grow and mandates for data publication become more pervasive, automated means for managing these complex workflows to ensure data integrity have a growing role in modern science. Globus Flows is a foundational service for orchestrating secure and reliable data and compute tasks at scale. In this session we will introduce Globus Flows and how it fits into the Globus ecosystem of data management services. We will discuss how flows can feed into downstream data portals, science gateways, and data commons, enabling search and discovery of data by the broader community. We will demonstrate how to run various Globus provided flows and discuss initiating flows with triggers and inserting compute tasks into flows. We will conclude with an interactive tutorial detailing how to build custom flows using Jupyter notebooks and the Globus web app.

Tuesday May 21, 2024 3:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 205

5:00pm MDT

 
Wednesday, May 22
 

8:00am MDT

Breakfast- Sponsored by Omnibond
Wednesday May 22, 2024 8:00am - 9:00am MDT
Wolf Law Cafeteria

9:00am MDT

Student Poster Presentations
Wednesday May 22, 2024 9:00am - 9:15am MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

9:15am MDT

Cultivating Minds, Connecting Communities: Cyberinfrastructure at Tribal Colleges
The integration and enhancement of research cyberinfrastructure (CI) at tribal colleges is crucial for advancing education and research in today's digital age. The keynote presentation, "Cultivating Minds, Connecting Communities," explores the vital role of CI in supporting tribal colleges, enhancing academic pursuits, and narrowing the technological gap.

This presentation will discuss the importance of connecting tribal college faculty and students with the broader CI research community, fostering collaboration and innovation. It will showcase examples of successful CI implementations and CI needs at Salish Kootenai College and other tribal colleges, illustrating their impact on student engagement, research opportunities, and community development.

The challenges encountered in establishing CI at tribal colleges will also be addressed, along with strategies for overcoming these obstacles.

Attendees will leave with an understanding of the importance of cyberinfrastructure in shaping the future of tribal colleges and the communities they serve.

Speakers
AA

Al Anderson

Salish Kootenai College


Wednesday May 22, 2024 9:15am - 10:30am MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

10:40am MDT

Accelerate your research with Oracle Cloud
Oracle cloud is designed to make research easier, faster, and more accurate; to empower researchers with the most-advanced technologies so they can unlock new insights and make discoveries that change the world. Oracle AI is a family of accelerated infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and machine learning (ML) services. For AI training and inferencing, Oracle’s AI infrastructure offers ultralow latencies for standalone graphics processing units (GPUs) and clusters with thousands of nodes. Using AI services, developers can add prebuilt models to applications and operations. With ML services, data scientists can build, train, and deploy models with their favorite open source frameworks or benefit from the speed of in-database machine learning.

Speakers
AR

Ashwin Rakhra

AVP of Sales, NACI Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Oracle


Wednesday May 22, 2024 10:40am - 11:10am MDT
Room 205

10:40am MDT

Approaches for deploying application software
In this talk we will go over several different approaches to install applications, both as an individual user and as a sysadmin. First we give a short overview of how we install and use the Spack package manager. We show an example of package installation workflow, basic caveats and their solutions, and how we allow users to chain onto our system Spack installation to use Spack themselves. Then we explain how one install programs via Miniconda or a container, and create Lmod module files for them to ease the program deployment and use. This module based Miniconda and container installation approach is used both for system-wide installations and by individual users, empowering the users to maintain their own software stack.

Speakers
MC

Martin Cuma

University of Wyoming


Wednesday May 22, 2024 10:40am - 11:10am MDT
Room 204

10:40am MDT

Challenges of Research Cost Management in Public Cloud
The biggest fear of the public cloud is often how much it can cost and managing the bills. Moving to usage-based charges is a big transition from use of centrally funded large systems.In this session we’ll discuss the ways our Cloud Foundations team helps ease this fear including
  • Standard contracts and discounts 
  • Cost estimation and service selection consults 
  • Budget management (reports, alerts, actions) 
  • Cost optimization reviews through the lifecycle of a research project 

Speakers
JA

Jason Armbruster

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 10:40am - 11:10am MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

10:40am MDT

Empowering HPC Adoption Through Industry Best Practices.
Investing in high-performance computing (HPC) is a significant commitment, and garnering user buy-in can be equally challenging. In our discussion today, we aim to explore the most effective strategies observed in the industry for increasing awareness and fostering user engagement within the realm of HPC.

Speakers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 10:40am - 11:10am MDT
Room 207

10:40am MDT

Exploring Large Language Models in the Cloud and On Premise
Large language models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing and have numerous applications in various domains. However, the choice of deploying these models in the cloud or on-premise can greatly affect their performance, accessibility, and security. In this session, we will hear from two experts about their experiences with large language models in different deployment environments.

They will discuss the challenges of maintaining and scaling these models, as well as the importance of data privacy and security.

They will be addressing API access or lack thereof. They will discuss the benefits of scalability and accessibility.
Through this session, attendees will gain a better understanding of the trade-offs and considerations when deploying large language models in different environments. They will also learn about the practical challenges and solutions for managing and accessing these models, and how to make informed decisions based on their specific needs and requirements.

Speakers
GS

Gil Speyer

Arizona State University
BB

Brandon Biggs

Idaho National Lab


Wednesday May 22, 2024 10:40am - 11:10am MDT
Room 206

11:15am MDT

What's next for RMACC?
Join RMACC representatives to hear what new things RMACC is working on and what we think the future of RMACC looks like. We will discuss the results of the Fall 2023 RMACC member interviews and how that is driving our ideas for the future of RMACC

Speakers
BY

Becky Yeager

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 11:15am - 11:45am MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

11:15am MDT

30 years of love and hate of providing research data services -- solved.
Providing HPC/AI storage services, while meeting research PI expectations, incorporating University mandates, like cloud, security, and backup from Tier 0 scratch to T3 deep archive has finally been successfully solved.   Since the late 1980’s and the invention of supercomputing, data has always driven users, PI’s and their teams abilities to find insights.  It has also been the slowest technology to develop into PI and researcher friendly hardware and software solutions, especially across multiple protocols.  For HPC/AI providers stress is increased because now it is common to have billions and billions of files and multiple petabytes of data.  To complicate matters further, Users and PI’s are faced with multiple tools, manual movement of data, and understanding of each storage’s characteristics.  The final jab to those HPC/AI storage Administrators comes when implementing new technology.  Simply moving billions and billions of files with multiple petabytes is a massive challenging due to the scale.  Old tools such as ‘rsync’ simply were never designed to handle billions of files with days of running not being uncommon just to walk the inodes.

Join us in this talk as we discuss new data storage methods in HPC/AI centers, how to enable migrations without disruption to different platforms. We will cover how this is focused on the users and research PI’s while allowing the HPC/AI Storage admins to enable automation – and take advantage of multi-tier, multi copy features. Lastly, we will show how easy it is for HPC/AI storage admins to be able to say “Yes” to S3 without forcing code re-writes to S3 protocols, and retaining POSIX access.

Speakers
GA

Guy Adams

Kalray Inc.


Wednesday May 22, 2024 11:15am - 11:45am MDT
Room 207

11:15am MDT

ASU's use of Warewulf in production Research and Secure Computing Environments
Warewulf is a tool for stateless provisioning of HPC clusters. Arizona State University has been deploying Warewulf 4 in production Research and Secure Computing environments. Warewulf has resulted in significant improvements to standing up ASU's HPC systems relative to previous stateful-based implementations provided by Cobbler and Kickstart.

Speakers
JB

Josh Burks

Arizona State University


Wednesday May 22, 2024 11:15am - 11:45am MDT
Room 204

11:15am MDT

Unlocking the Power of Metadata: Streamlining Data Discoverability and Management for Efficient Research
High-performance computing (HPC) systems are often used to process vast amounts of data in scientific research, engineering, and other fields. As data is generated at a greater rate and complexity, the management of data becomes a significant challenge for HPC users. Imagine trying to find a deceased researcher’s data files from seventeen years ago.  Now, let’s say you found the data but there are 400 data sets that are just binary files numbered sequentially and you don’t know which of the results are of interest to you?

The importance of metadata in HPC moving forward cannot be overstated. It is a fundamental technology that enables researchers to better understand their data, making it easier to search, access, and analyze. Metadata can describe the structure, content, and context of data, empowering researchers to quickly find and access the information they need without having to search through vast amounts of data. It can also be used to ensure the quality and accuracy of data including tracking the data's provenance and usage.

Metadata is especially useful in large-scale scientific research projects where data is shared among multiple researchers and institutions. Evolving technologies like Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) have been as revolutionary for digital data as the Dewey Decimal System was for books in libraries. Metadata can help researchers understand how the data was generated, what assumptions were made, and what processing steps were taken. It can also be used to ensure data consistency and accuracy across different locations, allowing researchers to collaborate more effectively, and deliver results sooner.

And metadata saves money. HPC systems often require massive amounts of storage, which can be difficult to manage without an efficient and scalable data management solution. Metadata can be used to organize data and make it more manageable, reducing the amount of storage required, and free you up to choose the storage technology that best fits your workflow. This can lead to significant cost savings for institutions, as well as improved data management and processing.
 
Target Audience: Everyone! Whether representing a big organization or themselves, intelligent use of metadata can substantially reduce the time and expense needed for data management.

Speakers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 11:15am - 11:45am MDT
Room 205

11:15am MDT

Visualizing supercomputer node status on Open OnDemand with Plotly

The Sol supercomputer provides Arizona State University researchers access to a state-of-the-art system with an observed GPU-only High Performance Linpack speed of 2.42 PetaFLOP/s. This short paper details the implementation of a popular Plotly-powered status page that is accessible by Sol's users through the Open OnDemand interface. The page is automatically updated once a minute and abstracts supercomputer nodes as squares that are colored by their SLURM status. GPU status is further indicated with subset circle symbols, that are either empty (idle) or filled (allocated). GPU slicing through NVIDIA's multi instance GPU (MIG) software is also indicated by circles that fill proportionally to the allocation. The source code is provided online with an open-source license.

Speakers
JY

Jason Yalim

Arizona State University


Wednesday May 22, 2024 11:15am - 11:45am MDT
Room 206

11:45am MDT

Lunch- Sponsored by DDN
Wednesday May 22, 2024 11:45am - 1:00pm MDT
Wolf Law Cafeteria

1:00pm MDT

RMACC Student Career Panel
Join us for a student career panel where you will hear from HPC professionals about how they entered the HPC workforce and what they are looking for when hiring new employees. This will be a one hour session broke into presentations and time for questions

Moderators
Speakers
TB

Torey Battelle

Arizona State University


Wednesday May 22, 2024 1:00pm - 2:30pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

1:00pm MDT

RMACC DEI Committee- Support of MSI's in the RMACC Region
Join the RMACC DEI Committee to continue the discussion from Al Anderson's Keynote about supporting Tribal Colleges, Community Colleges, HSI's, and regional universities. We will discuss  the importance of connecting faculty and students with the broader HPC/CI research community and fostering collaboration and innovation.

We will discuss the integration and enhancement of research cyberinfrastructure (CI) regionally and how we can advance education and research in today's digital age. Our panelists will speak about the needs of their communities and how regionally we can help enhance academic pursuits and narrow the technological gap. Panelists will discuss the challenges they have encountered in establishing HPC/CI at their schools and any strategies they have found for overcoming these obstacles.



Moderators
SK

Shelley Knuth

University of Colorado Boulder

Speakers
SO

Stephen Oglesby

Colorado State University
AA

Al Anderson

Salish Kootenai College


Wednesday May 22, 2024 1:00pm - 2:30pm MDT
Room 205

1:00pm MDT

Cloud Computing for Everyone: Getting Started With Jetstream2
This tutorial will provide an introduction to and guided exercises for using Jetstream2. Jetstream2 is a flexible, user-friendly cloud computing environment designed for everyone from researchers with minimal high-performance computing experience to software engineers looking for the latest in cloud-native approaches. Attendees will learn details about Jetstream2 including possible use cases, as well as information about the National Science Foundation's Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which supports Jetstream2. As a resource provider for the ACCESS program, Jetstream2 is available to users at no cost.
By the end of this tutorial, attendees will be able to log into Jetstream2, create and launch a virtual machine, attach a volume for data storage, and know how to apply best practices for instance management.

This session is appropriate for anyone regardless of cloud computing experience.

Note: Attendees will need to register for an ACCESS user ID prior to this tutorial to participate in the hands-on exercises. If they do not have an ACCESS ID, they may still attend and complete these activities asynchronously when the session ends.

Wednesday May 22, 2024 1:00pm - 2:30pm MDT
Room 206

1:00pm MDT

Geospatial Data Analysis with Machine Learning
This hands-on tutorial explores two distinct machine learning projects centered around geospatial data analysis. It aims to shed light on the unique challenges encountered when working with geospatial data and provides practical insights into evaluating and scoring geospatial models.

While not intended as an introductory course to machine learning or an exploration of cutting-edge techniques like Transformer models, this tutorial offers valuable depth into geospatial data processing and modeling. Proficiency in the scientific Python stack, encompassing tools such as NumPy, Pandas, and Xarray, is advantageous, though not obligatory for participation. Participants can expect a hands-on approach, engaging with real-world earth systems science geospatial datasets.

Speakers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 1:00pm - 2:30pm MDT
Room 204

1:00pm MDT

Intel- AI Solutions for Researchers and Developers
Intel provides the most comprehensive AI hardware and software solutions in the industry.
In this session Intel engineers will discuss:
  • Intel AI Software and Tools: Intel’s role in AI, the Intel oneAPI software stack, working closely with the AI community, Intel’s extensions for open-source ML and DL frameworks such as Intel Distribution for Python, Pytorch, Tensorflow and Transformers. We will also discuss how to leverage the AI Tools Selector to get the right software stack.
  • Intel’s AI Hardware, best in class solutions: CPUs, GPUs, Accelerators
  • Deep Learning and Framework tools: We will dive deep into individual DL frameworks on small to LLM models, also how to enable different modes of execution (FP32/BF16/iInt8/Int4) to enable AMX and get several folds of performance running AI workloads.
  • Domain Toolkits, Reference Kits, and Apps: Intel has reference kits and toolkits to enable developers with the right AI tools for different verticals such as Health Care, Retail, Manufacturing etc. We will cover how to pick off-the-shelf kits to build your use case to accelerate your time to solution.
  • GenAI SW: Intel’s software efforts in Large Language Model space, optimizations, and tools available for models like llama2, GPT, Mistral, etc.
  • Intel Developer Cloud (IDC): Intel offers developers to utilize IDC to kick-start their AI journey with Intel’s line of hardware products. We will cover the benefits of using IDC and how to get started.

Speakers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 1:00pm - 2:30pm MDT
Room 207

2:40pm MDT

First Steps in Utilizing ColdFront in an HPC Environment
ColdFront is a community supported allocation management system for HPC environments. We are working towards phasing out our current allocation management system (RCAMP) because of time/cost of maintaining the software in-house. We have setup a development environment as a proof of concept and worked through some of our initial concerns to verify ColdFront could work for us. This work focuses on the separation of account management versus allocation management. Out of the box, ColdFront’s account management capabilities are limited. We will walk through different approaches to authenticating users and how they gain access to allocations.

Speakers
KR

Kyle Reinholt

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 2:40pm - 3:10pm MDT
Room 204

2:40pm MDT

AMD Technology for HPC & AI
Come by to learn more about how AMD leadership technology can help with your HPC and AI needs.

Speakers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 2:40pm - 3:10pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

2:40pm MDT

Big Storage, Small Budget: A Survey of Methods for Beating the Costs of File Storage
This session is a crash course on all of the different methods and architectures for beating the cost of file-based storage with some commentary on the advantages and pitfalls of each approach. The obvious solutions involve moving hot and cold files between storage tiers and/or deploying novel technologies for compression and/or deduplication, but, as with everything, the devil is in the details.

How do you know what data to move and where to move it to?
How do you actually move the data?
What are different approaches for applications and users to reconcile path names when files move?
How do you separate junk from data of lasting value?
Where are the trade-offs between costs, complexity, and vendor lock-in?
The lecturer is the CTO of Cambridge Computer and the founder of Starfish Storage, but he will only touch on Starfish's role in orchestrating storage tiering and data life cycle management. Instead, the focus will be on a whole bunch of technologies (some obvious and some not so obvious) that purport to beat the cost of storage.

Topics Covered:
Dedupe and compression
Hard drives: PMR, HMMR, SMR
Flash drives: SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC
Tape (yes, it still exists)
File stubs and symlinks
Tiering to object storage
Virtual name spaces
Inline (symmetric) v. Out of band (asymmetric) name spaces
Leveraging the users with charge-back, show-back, shame-back, and quotas
Data catalogs with integrated data movers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 2:40pm - 3:10pm MDT
Room 205

2:40pm MDT

Providing tiered data management, curation, and sharing support for grant proposals and budgets
Recent trends in research funder policies and guidelines increasingly point to requirements for more detailed plans for data management, curation, and sharing with an emphasis on including allowable costs in grant budgets to support these activities as well. This presentation describes the development and implementation of a tiered grant support model at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship that provides three levels of services, infrastructure, and expertise to researchers who are looking to incorporate support and costs for data management, curation, and sharing into their grant proposals. This model may serve as an example for other institutions to use or adapt to continue to help researchers meet funder requirements while simultaneously increasing the visibility and sustainability of existing data management and curation resources.

Speakers
AJ

Andrew Johnson

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 2:40pm - 3:10pm MDT
Room 206

2:40pm MDT

Introduction to the Commercial Cloud
CU Boulder Research Computing Cloud Foundation Service provides access to centrally provisioned public cloud services for administrative, teaching & learning, and research needs. This includes new and existing applications, big data workloads and other workloads well suited to the major public cloud services, including Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
This session will provide a high level overview of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure’s commercial cloud services. We’ll first introduce cloud computing concepts, then dive into the console of both services and explore their basic features. We will conclude with resources for learning and getting started, including a run down of the Cloud Foundations Service. This session includes live demos, but participants are not expected to follow along.

Speakers
DG

Dylan Gottlieb

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 2:40pm - 3:10pm MDT
Room 207

3:10pm MDT

Break
Wednesday May 22, 2024 3:10pm - 3:20pm MDT
Wolf Law Cafeteria

3:25pm MDT

Challenges in Recruiting and Hiring Diverse Candidates in HPC- WHPC
Join the RMACC WHPC Chapter for a discussion about the challenges in recruiting and hiring diverse candidates in IT and HPC. We will discuss what diversity means, some of the successes and challenges we have faced and how to find and recruit the best candidates while encouraging new and exciting voices to join us in the HPC world. 

Speakers
KS

Kailei Stiffler

University of Colorado Boulder
BY

Becky Yeager

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 3:25pm - 4:25pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

3:25pm MDT

How Well do You Know Your Data? – The Impact of Data Management on HPC Workloads
As HPC workloads continue to grow in size and complexity, efficient data management becomes increasingly crucial for the overall performance of the system.  This presentation explores the impact of data management on HPC workloads and how critical it is becoming for efficient HPC.

Frequently, test results cannot be duplicated, data sets get misplaced, and the proper handling of data is compromised during storage upgrades or staff changes. The datasets for research projects are continuously expanding, demanding efficient data and storage management. Groundbreaking discoveries often come with their own unique data management challenges. This includes the need to handle large volumes of data, manage data access and sharing, and ensure data consistency and integrity. Increasingly, research is done colaboratively and often across continents. There are often constraints on the data due to: privacy, who funded its collection; as well as access, security and storage costs. The importance of achieving the right data management strategy becomes paramount as the size, and complexiety, of HPC datasets continues to increase.

Join us as we discuss the impact of data management on HPC workflows, survey some of the current research trends and future directions, and explore real-world use cases and best practices from organizations optimizing their data management in support of breakthrough research. The session will explore data management for immediate computational needs as well as alternatives for long-term data access, management, and preservation. This is an interactive session where we invite the audience to share best practices.

Target Audience: Everyone! Whether representing a big organization or themselves, efficient data management is crucial for maximizing system performance ensuring data is preserved and accessible. This presentation delves into the challenges of managing expanding research datasets, emphasizing the need for effective data management strategies by using real-world use cases and best practices.

Speakers
SP

Steve Paulson

Arcitecta


Wednesday May 22, 2024 3:25pm - 4:25pm MDT
Room 205

3:25pm MDT

Getting involved in an open source community: a beginner's guide
Most of us use at least some form of open-souce software, often developed by coalitions of commercial stakeholders, passionate hobbyists, and invested users. Advanced research computing in particular depends broadly on such projects: our operating systems, resource managers, containerization systems, even scientific software itself is often community-driven and open source. Yet, for all the value we get from these communities, it can often be difficult to know how to start participating in open source yourself. And contribution is not simply a matter of altruism: being a part of an open-source project that you depend on gives you the ability to influence the development of the software you use to more closely fit your ever-changing needs.

In this talk we will discuss three active open source projects--Rocky Linux, Warewulf, and Apptainer--including an overview of each project's structure, who to know and how to get in touch, and how someone new to the project can get involved, with opportunities ranging as wide as development, documentation, and even community management.

We'll end with Q&A and time to discuss additional contribution opportunities in other projects brought by the audience.

Wednesday May 22, 2024 3:25pm - 4:25pm MDT
Room 204

3:25pm MDT

AlphaFold2 on Alpine
AlphaFold2 is an open-source artificial intelligence program that predicts the 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequence. The program and its underlying algorithm solve a long-standing problem in structural biology, so adoption by the research community has been swift and enthusiastic. Running AlphaFold2 involves a simple input file and few parameter specifications, but requires access to large-scale computational resources such as GPUs and enough RAM to perform a search against a collection of datasets exceeding 2 TB. This session, aimed at researchers and research facilitators, will provide an overview of running AlphaFold2 on Alpine, covering performance considerations and limitations, predicting monomer and multimer proteins, checking AlphaFold2 outputs, and how to take advantage of spin-offs like ParaFold. Participants will receive training accounts for Alpine and can follow along using a hands-on example.

Speakers
LF

Layla Freeborn

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 3:25pm - 4:25pm MDT
Room 206

3:25pm MDT

Simplifying Cloud Adoption for Researchers: Seamlessly Extend Your On-Premises Cluster with AWS
This session will demonstrate the simplicity of bursting workloads to the AWS cloud. Bursting allows researchers to augment on-premises cluster capabilities by leveraging AWS' compute options, scale, and on-demand availability. This enables researchers to track technology advancements, access limited or unavailable on-premises hardware, and run longer and/or larger-scale jobs, all as needed, scaling to zero when not in use. Cloud resources are presented and accessed via the familiar on-premises scheduler interface, eliminating the need for researchers to have cloud skills. The scheduler can also be leveraged to manage cloud spending at both the job and project level, addressing researchers' concerns about cloud costs.

Speakers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 3:25pm - 4:25pm MDT
Room 207

4:30pm MDT

Day in the Life as an HPC SysAdmin
Are you interested in pursuing a career as a system administrator? Are you curious as to what HPC System Administrators do on a typical workday? Is there such a thing as a typical workday in the HPC world?

Come and hear from a panel of RMACC System Administrators about what a typical day in their work life looks like!

Moderators
CE

Craig Earley

University of Colorado Boulder

Speakers
BH

Brian Haymore

University of Utah
KB

Kelly Byrne

Idaho National Lab
JC

Jesse Caldwell

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 204

4:30pm MDT

Creating and Running a Micro-Credentialed Multi-Institution Research Data Camp
University of Colorado Boulder Libraries has for the last few years been running a three-day Research Data Camp aimed at graduate students that covers data ethics, data management, data analysis, and more. Students who attend the camp and complete a final project that demonstrates specific knowledge and skills taught at the Research Data Camp can receive a micro-credential from University of Colorado Boulder. For the most recent camp, we partnered with Colorado State University Libraries and promoted the virtual event to students from both campuses.

Speakers
MM

Matthew Murray

University of Colorado Boulder
MS

Mara Sedlins

Colorado State University
AR

Aditya Ranganath

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 206

4:30pm MDT

Deploying the AWS Landing Zone Accelerator at CU Boulder
CU Boulder (with AWS Professional Services support) has deployed the Landing Zone Accelerator for Education to replace our homegrown “landing zone” and is in the process of migrating accounts.This session will outline our goals (Security! Compliance!) the process and our lessons learned along the way.

Speakers
JA

Jason Armbruster

University of Colorado Boulder


Wednesday May 22, 2024 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Wolf Law Courtroom

4:30pm MDT

NVIDIA Omniverse – The Platform for 3D Simulation, Scientific Visualization, and Digital Twins
 Come to this session to see how building a Digital Twin Center of Excellence, anchored by NVIDIA Omniverse, can dramatically accelerate research by bringing researchers, both traditional and non-traditional, across institutions into shared virtual spaces so that they can view, analyze, discover, and publish their breakthroughs and findings faster and through real-time collaboration. We’ll walk through actual examples and practical case studies to see how you can get started or accelerate the use of digital twins and visualization in your current research.

Speakers
AL

Andy Lin

VP Strategy and CTO, Mark III Systems (NVIDIA Elite Partner), Mark III


Wednesday May 22, 2024 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 205

4:30pm MDT

The Shift to Object Storage – Learn or Get Left Behind
Why is embracing Object Storage becoming imperative to manage exponential data growth? This session will explore reasons behind why so many organizations are adopting Object Storage – from security, scalability, extensibility, and some of the roadblocks including the birth process to force end users out of their “File Comfort Zone”.

Speakers

Wednesday May 22, 2024 4:30pm - 5:00pm MDT
Room 207

5:00pm MDT

 
Thursday, May 23
 

8:00am MDT

Breakfast
Thursday May 23, 2024 8:00am - 9:00am MDT
Wolf Law Cafeteria

9:00am MDT

Addressing Growing Demand for Generative AI in Universities
Learn how universities across the country are harnessing the power of Gen AI to advance programs. In this session you’ll hear about new use cases across new departments, as well as how HPE and NVIDIA are helping administration respond to this fast-growing demand.

Speakers
AL

Andy Lin

Mark III Systems


Thursday May 23, 2024 9:00am - 10:30am MDT
Room 204

9:00am MDT

Cloud for the Classroom: Jetstream2 for Instructors and Teaching Assistants
This informative session will highlight the benefits and unique needs of using Jetstream2 in the context of a class. Attendees will learn about the instruction-specific practical application of Jetstream2 from past and current use cases. The presenters will provide an overview for getting started with Jetstream2, such as requesting an allocation, logging in, and understanding the different user interfaces. Additional discussion topics will include estimating needs based on class size, adding users (students, assistants) at the appropriate access level, guiding students in creating their virtual machines, security considerations, and best practices for instance management.

Thursday May 23, 2024 9:00am - 10:30am MDT
Room 205

9:00am MDT

Deploying application software with Spack, Miniconda and containers
In this tutorial we expand on the talk presented earlier, teaching the attendees on various installation processes. About half of this will be spent on the Spack package manager, going over some customizations, package installations and basic troubleshooting. The rest of the tutorial will go overhow to install programs via Miniconda, Micromamba or a container. We will install Miniconda and a container program based on Micromamba and create Lmod module files for these programs for easy loading and unloading of these programs' environment. This tutorial is intended for research computing facilitators or administrators that install programs at their RC centers, and for users who want to learn how program installations work, or want to do it themselves. A prerequisite is basic Linux commands and scripting knowledge, and knowledge of a command line editor.

Speakers
MC

Martin Cuma

University of Wyoming


Thursday May 23, 2024 9:00am - 10:30am MDT
Room 206

9:00am MDT

Leveraging High-Performance Computing in the Cloud
High-Performance Computing (HPC) has become indispensable in various fields by enabling complex simulations, data analysis, and scientific research. Traditionally confined to on-premises infrastructure, the emergence of cloud computing offers new avenues for HPC, promising scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. We explore the paradigm shift towards running HPC workloads in the cloud, highlighting key benefits such as on-demand resource provisioning, elastic scaling, and access to advanced computing architectures. Additionally, we will discuss some of the current challenges, IT and engineering department are facing when running HPC on premises including resource capacity, performance optimization, and cost management, alongside strategies to mitigate these obstacles. Through a comprehensive examination of case studies and industry trends, this abstract explains the transformative potential of migrating HPC to the cloud, paving the way for enhanced computational capabilities, accelerated innovation, and broader accessibility to advanced computing resources.

Speakers
SB

Santosh Bhatt

Master Principal Solution Engineering, Government and Education, Oracle


Thursday May 23, 2024 9:00am - 10:30am MDT

10:35am MDT

Choosing a cloud storage plan for data backups
Join the RMACC System Administrator community for a discussion on choosing a cloud storage plan for data backups. This will be a moderated discussion so come prepared to share what your organization has tried in terms of cloud storage plans, what has worked, challenges you have faced, and ideas for the future. 

Moderators
BW

Bruce Welker

University of Colorado Boulder

Thursday May 23, 2024 10:35am - 11:05am MDT
Room 204

10:35am MDT

Nvidia Trends and Their Impact on Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure
Nvidia has recently released the Grace Hopper Superchip Platform, which introduces a new architecture with different performance characteristics for accelerated computing and generative AI workloads. At the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia made several announcements, including the debut of the Blackwell platform, which provides additional insight into their direction. This talk will examine current trends and provide actionable steps for researchers, IT staff, and data center administrators to prepare for the future.

Thursday May 23, 2024 10:35am - 11:05am MDT
Room 205

10:35am MDT

Persistent Unique Identifiers for Instruments and Facilities
Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) such as ORCID (for researchers) and DOIs (for publications and datasets) have become widespread and accepted within academia. There is, as of yet, no standard for using identifiers for scientific instruments and facilities. This session will discuss the progress of an NSF FAIR Open Science Research Coordination Network-funded project including the reasons for using PIDs for facilities and instruments, the challenges that will be faced in pushing for their widespread adoption, and incentives that might encourage researchers and staff to use them.

Speakers
MM

Matthew Murray

University of Colorado Boulder
AR

Aditya Ranganath

University of Colorado Boulder


Thursday May 23, 2024 10:35am - 11:05am MDT
Room 206

10:35am MDT

Quantum Computing: Facilitation for Today’s Systems, Preparing for Near Future Capabilities
Quantum computing holds immense promise for achieving computational gains once thought unattainable given the physical limits to classical computing resources. Certain classes of problems could benefit greatly from exponential speedups obtainable from the exploitation of the principles of quantum mechanics. In this workshop, we will look at realistic capabilities of current-era quantum computing resources; how these (and other use cases) might scale with quantum hardware, and strategies for integration of quantum resources with HPC. Introducing and assimilating quantum computing-related protocols to conventional computing paradigms inevitably complicate the challenges facing facilitators; the majority of discussion will center on sharing current approaches and experience in this space, and brainstorming new ideas and methodologies to ease the inclusion of the exciting and paradigm-changing quantum computing technologies.

Speakers
TB

Torey Battelle

Arizona State University


Thursday May 23, 2024 10:35am - 11:05am MDT
Room 207

11:10am MDT

Research and Engineering Studio on AWS (RES)
Research and Engineering Studio on AWS (RES) is an open-source, user-friendly web portal designed to empower researchers and engineers (end-users) with seamless access to cloud storage and compute resources. RES enables research IT administrators to easily create and manage projects, including budgets, software stacks, users, and groups, all within a secure environment.
With RES, end-users can run simulations, process, share, and visualize their data, access interactive applications, and leverage other native AWS services and solutions without the need to provision AWS accounts or navigate the AWS Management Console directly.
In this demo session, we will explore the architecture of RES, showcase its intuitive user interface, highlight the platform's extensibility, and provide examples of how to integrate RES with other AWS services, such as HPC clusters."

Speakers

Thursday May 23, 2024 11:10am - 12:10pm MDT
Room 205

11:10am MDT

Supporting Users with Cross-Institutional Access to Resources
Join the University of Colorado Boulder's Research Computing team to discuss how to provide cross-institutional access to resources and the successes and challenges that arise. We will also discuss ideas of improvement and how different institutions are handling these requests.

Some topics of conversation will include:
  • the software stack (coordinating system-wide installations, lmod tracking)
  • enabling institutional partners' staff to support their researchers (RCAMP, NFS group limits, ServiceNow business services)
  • Slurm management for institutional buy-ins- partitions, priority, constraints
  • monthly usage reporting
  • Authentication














Moderators
CE

Craig Earley

University of Colorado Boulder
LF

Layla Freeborn

University of Colorado Boulder

Thursday May 23, 2024 11:10am - 12:10pm MDT
Room 204

11:10am MDT

Building Digital Twins for Research with NVIDIA Omniverse and how GenAI can serve as an accelerant
Join HPE, NVIDIA, and Mark III for a session on how Omniverse and GenAI together can provide a solid foundation for building and deploying 3D simulations and digital twins, no matter your research focus or current skill level. This will session provide a walk-through and tutorial on key concepts and terms around 3D simulation and digital twins, with a focus on how Omniverse can be used as an open platform to enable many internal and external collaborators to contribute to any project. In addition, generative AI can then be used in some scenarios to assist with the process of building out 3D assets or injecting AI models into the simulation, which can significantly accelerate and simplify the buildout of the digital twin to align with any research focus.

Thursday May 23, 2024 11:10am - 12:10pm MDT
Room 207

11:10am MDT

Alpine in your Browser with OOD
Do you want to use Alpine to easily run graphical applications, transfer data, and submit jobs, all from your browser? Open OnDemand is a browser based interactive tool that provides access to CU Research Computing (CURC) resources (such as Alpine and Blanca). It is the primary method that allows institutions in RMACC to access CURC resources and is also extremely useful for any individual who is new to High Performance Computing systems.
In this course, we will cover logging in, performing small data transfers, accessing a login node, and starting interactive applications (such as Jupyter) all via Open OnDemand. Additionally, we will demonstrate how to use common graphical applications, such as Jupyter Notebooks and RStudio.

Speakers
BR

Brandon Reyes

University of Colorado Boulder


Thursday May 23, 2024 11:10am - 12:10pm MDT
Room 206

12:15pm MDT

Lunch
Thursday May 23, 2024 12:15pm - 1:15pm MDT
Wolf Law Cafeteria
 
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