XSEDE Using ROCKS to Help Ease Access to Campus Clusters

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XSEDE logoThis week XSEDE announced a new initiative aimed at making it easier to manage computing clusters and improve the ease with which researchers and students can use local and national cyberinfrastructure.

We have many goals with this project,” said David Lifka, whose group at Cornell University created the software distributions. “One of which is to make it easier for people running clusters on campus to also use XSEDE clusters with skills transferring from XSEDE to campus clusters.” This consistency means that XSEDE documentation and instructional materials can more easily be used in training about local campus resources.

A new ROCKS Rolls distribution is one of several steps XSEDE will take to make it easier for researchers to use campus and national resources. One of the next steps will be to release libraries of RPMs, so that people who already have a cluster set up and running well can add to it the tools included in the basic XSEDE-compatible cluster build. RPMs will also be used as a way to maintain the clusters built with ROCKS Rolls.

In this video, Dr. Craig Stewart of Indiana University and Dr. Marcus Alfred of Howard University discuss XSEDE’s (The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) goal of Campus Bridging as a means of making research easier across the scientific community.

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