Research Facilitation
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NEREN SEMINAR Bridging the Gap: Research Facilitation PRESENTING SPONSOR: RED RIVER TECHNOLOGY SPONSORS: PENGUIN COMPUTING & IGNEOUS SYSTEMS FRIDAY, MARCH 31, 2017 8:30AM – 3:00PM Hyatt Regency Cambridge 575 Memorial Drive Cambridge, Massachusetts Register at redriver.com/neren-seminar In collaboration with UMass Amherst and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), NEREN presents the second in a series of day long seminars devoted to REGIONAL COLLABORATION AND RESEARCH COMPUTING. 1 // NEREN SEMINAR AGENDA 8:30AM – 9:00AM Registration/Continental Breakfast/Networking 9:30AM – 9:40AM Welcoming/Opening Remarks (NEREN) 9:40AM – 10:00AM Trends Enabling Analytics, Data and Collaboration Presenter: Paul Krein, Vice President of Digital and Cloud Solutions, Red River Advances in technology, new computing models, and industry investments are making collaboration, advanced analytics, and large scale data sharing more accessible than ever before. These trends and advancements have the ability to bridge the gaps and reshape the pace of innovation. 10:00AM – 10:40AM New and Existing Infrastructure Presenter: James A. Cuff, Assistant Dean for Research and Computing, Harvard University and Co-Principal Investigator – ACI-REF More and more our national computational infrastructure continues to grow in size, scale and complexity. Our researchers rather than finding easy and seamless access to boundless resource are actually finding increasing friction between them and the resources they desperately need in a world driven by Big Data. ACI-REF was designed as a 2 year pilot to investigate if direct application of human capital through facilitation would remove this friction. One of the critical work products of this activity was to develop a best practices handbook. James will discuss the evolution of the project and next steps for campuses as they continue to design their cyberinfrastructure strategies from lessons learned from this activity. Following on, James will describe the North East Storage Exchange, a 5 year funded effort just starting to develop a low cost, secure and highly performant object store for science and research. NESE builds on prior success with the MGHPCC data center for research and their shared operating model, and features investigators from each of Boston University, Northeastern University, MIT, Harvard and the University of Massachusetts. Their aim as like the “wetware” example of the ACI-REF program is to build frictionless access to large scale storage for science. 10:40AM – 11:20AM Bridging the Gap - Facilitating Collaborative Life Science Research in Commercial & Enterprise Environments Presenter: Chris Dagdigian, Co-Founder and Senior Director of Infrastructure BioTeam The future of pharmaceutical drug development increasingly requires complex multi-party collaboration (and high-scale data exchange) among public, private, academic and non-profit organizations. While collaborating in one area, some parties may be fierce competitors in other areas. Using recent work with Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical clients, Chris will candidly discuss current and emerging challenges, trends and requirements for facilitating collaborative research across, with and among commercial entities. 2 // NEREN SEMINAR 11:20AM – Noon Research Computing Facilitators – A Collaborative Approach Presenter: John Goodhue, Executive Director, MGHPCC Research Computing Facilitators combine technical knowledge and strong interpersonal skills with a service mindset, and use their connections with cyberinfrastructure providers to ensure that researchers and educators have access to the best available resources. It is widely recognized that Research Computing Facilitators are critical to successful use of research computing resources, but in very short supply. This talk will discuss two ideas, developed by several NEREN members, that could make it easier for small and medium sized-institutions to fill their need for Research Computing Facilitators: (1) Build a shared regional pool of experts who can work across institutions. This can both increase the range of available knowledge and skills, and provide “bench depth” that makes it easier to manage turnover and handle bursts of activity. (2) Work with this pool of experts to create mentoring and work assignment opportunities that give students greater exposure to the Research Computing Facilitator role. Noon – 12:30PM Lunch break 12:30PM – 12:45PM Case Study – Penguin Computing, Brian Hammond Ph.D 12:45PM – 1:00PM Case Study – Igneous Systems, Stephen Pao, CMO 1:10PM – 2:10PM Breakout sessions Presented by: Christopher Misra, Chief Technology Officer, UMass Amherst and James A. Cuff, Assistant Dean for Research and Computing, Harvard University and Co-Principal Investigator – ACI-REF and Chris Hill, Principal Research Engineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences 2:20 PM – 3:00PM Closing remarks Christopher Misra, UMass Amherst, Chief Technology Officer and Paul Krein, Vice President of Digital and Cloud Solutions, Red River ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS Paul Krein Paul Krein is the Vice President of Cloud and Digital Solutions, and the Office of the CTO at Red River. He leads the technology strategy Vice President of for Red River, leads the solutions and technology engineering teams, Digital and Cloud Solutions, and works with executives and technology leaders to understand the Red River art of the possible, assess impacts of leading trends, and evaluate the economic changes in delivering data and computational capacity at scale. His teams design and architect, build and run solutions for Healthcare/Lifesciences, Retail, Education and Government missions and infrastructure enabling greater efficiency and higher scale. He is a change agent, has opened new markets throughout his career, and has lead sales, management and business operations functions. Paul holds an M.B.A from the Simon School in Finance and Organizational Strategy, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester. James A. Cuff James Cuff is the Assistant Dean for Research Computing in the Division of Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. James also performs Assistant Dean for the role of Distinguished Engineer for Research Computing in HUIT Research and Computing, at Harvard University. His group supports advanced high performance Harvard University and technical computing (in excess of 60,000 processors), 2+PF of GPGPU, Co-Principal Investigator – and large scale storage systems for data science at over 20+PB. The ACI-REF group was involved in the initial design, build and eventual support of the MGHPCC project where they now run scientific computing and academic research systems supporting multiple schools at Harvard University. Prior to working at Harvard, James managed the Applied Production Systems Group at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Before moving to the US, James created the high performance computing infrastructure for the Ensembl project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. While completing his D. Phil. in protein secondary structure prediction, James worked at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge. James holds a D. Phil. in Molecular Biophysics from Oxford University and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Chemistry with Industrial Experience from Manchester University. Chris Dagdigian Accidental entrepreneur, cloud nerd and bioinformaticist-gone-bad Chris Dagdigian has spent much of the last 18 years designing, building, Co-Founder and Senior fixing and improving research-focused IT infrastructures used in Director of Infrastructure demanding production computing environments. Chris is the co-founder of the BioTeam Inc. (https://bioteam.net) - a specialist independent consultancy built around scientists and engineers who “bridge the research/IT gap” every day. He occasionally is known to blog, tweet and speak about industry trends and best practices. 4 // NEREN SEMINAR John Goodhue John Goodhue is the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC). The MGHPCC is dedicated Executive Director, to supporting the growing scientific computing needs of faculty-driven MGHPCC research at MIT, University of Massachusetts, Boston University, Northeastern University, and Harvard University. John is a business and technical leader with 30 years of experience in networking and high performance computing. John has held senior engineering management, general management, and technology leadership positions at Cisco Systems, where he led the development and marketing of Internet routers for service providers, and BBN Technologies, where he led projects to develop Internet routing and High Performance Computing technologies. He has also been on the early management teams for several Boston-area startup companies. John holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Christopher Misra Christopher Misra is the Chief Technology Officer with the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he has worked for many years. His Chief Technology Officer, responsibilities include management of overall campus technology UMass Amherst coordination, networking, data centers, information security program, identity management, and enterprise architecture. Chris has been active for many years with various regional and national information security organizations including the Security Task Force, Internet2 Salsa, and REN-ISAC, serving on program committees, chairing working groups,