2024-01-30 ACCESS EC Meeting Agenda & Summary

1. Approval of summaries from prior EC meeting @John Towns (5 mins)

2. 16th Jan 2024 EC Meeting Summary

   1. We may need to consider more than an hour for each meeting OR moving meetings to weekly again

      1. Suggestion 1 1/2 hours every two weeks

      2. maybe weekly for an hour thru March and then cut back?

         1. recommend highlighting items that are more FYI vs ones that need voting on in emails ahead of time and make sure the agenda is ordered with voting toward the top (at least through March)

         2. Decision: go back to weekly for an hour - and go short if we need to
            
            

3. Program Milestone Check @John Towns (5 mins)

   1. Action item for the awardees to update their program milestones

      1. We have solved some of the cross team dependencies and are down to recurring milestones

      2. Need to identify things upcoming for all teams and cross dependencies

      3. Remember - for Year 3 - can have finer grained milestones as needed

      4. Follow up with Jay re: CBE

      5. Follow up on Eval Plan Draft

      6. Resource Catalog - met just before end of year and will have more meetings coming up

      7. XDMOD - info is more information only - will be good once SDSC joins in

   2. Reminder: Do not edit "Dashboard" tab, please edit "ACCESS program milestones" tab as needed

   3. Review To Do list: https://access-ci.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ACP/pages/1081359/Executive+Council+Meetings#To-Do-Tasks-for-ACO-Leadership-from-EC-Meetings - SGX3 Meeting will be coming up soon
      
      

4. EAB Report from 12/5/23 Meeting @Shawn Strande (5mins)

   1. Report is here. We can discuss at a future meeting: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15TOikTjEp060zCGXgx5DmV0R-Opr90U2/view?usp=share_link

   2. Immediate question from the report: Would any of the Service Teams like a 1:1 meeting with the EAB at the February meeting, in the same way the ACO did? We can consider setting aside time for a couple of the teams

      1. some interest - could also be outside the Feb meeting

      2. if you want to at the meeting - we can put in agenda - otherwise we can schedule in the future - discuss topics from report with individual teams

         1. Shelley

         2. Metrics

         3. Stephen/Dave - wait for a virtual one

5. ACCESS Quarterly Meeting - September 2023

   1. Confirm Date - 9/16 or 9/23

      1. 9/16 - Tapia and Tim out

      2. 9/23 - looking good

         1. Sharon - check on CCStar meeting - moved to early 2025

   2. Discuss location of event

      1. Stephen D - host the meeting at the PSC offices

         1. We have one large meeting room on the main floor and several breakout room options. Since these are our regularly-scheduled meeting rooms there should be no cost to reserve these spaces, pending there's no other event scheduled. 

         2. Event can be wholly hosted at PSC - no other location needed for additional space

      2. @Tom Furlani Will check on Buffalo info

          

6. RP Forum Bylaws Vote - (defer vote to next week) - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s1jfE3CzI46y2tE6ZbS89HM6Tc5xQ7_8/view

   1. Let’s clarify what is referred to as “ACCESS Requirements Mgt Process”

      1. they passed around bylaws - and this verbiage is not clear as to what is in that process

      2. was left over verbiage from XSEDE - left in there because not sure how ACCESS will move forward for this process

   2. Number of Resource Providers reduced (from 30 to 8 ) - how did this get decided?

      1. was not discussed in EC

   3. Send questions to Jeremy Fischer so they can get them addressed offline

      1. Invite Jeremy to next EC meeting - @Lavanya Podila
         
         

7. Personas Working Group - @Shelley Knuth

   1. Recommendations Document submitted for feedback:

   2. We are seeking feedback on this doc, and would ultimately like to bring to a vote that the EC is in agreement that these personas are what ACCESS will be focused on, which would drive any work we are doing (ie, communications, website development, etc). 

      1. Questions

         1. Prioritization of Providers in the mix - be clear as to how someone will prioritize

         2. How does this fit in with ACCESS Goals for prioritizing

         3. How does this fit with Community Building - many listed are “already here” in ACCESS - do we need a persona for the people we are reaching out to? - more finely target people for PY3? we are trying to democratize

         4. Students Teachers and Computational researcher are our baseline - but how do we call out more finely targeted groups

         5. Maybe what we have are beginner, intermediate and advanced users - they come from different communities - and we may want to prioritize those communities - but they are all divided by skill levels

      2. People have been putting comments in document as well

      3. Personas vs Task Based needs - Personas were meant to be only a couple not many multiples

         1. what is the task they are trying to do? and this makes things simpler for them to find what they need

         2. personas were primarily a website comment originally

         3. personas give us who and how to reach out and engage - to clear up semantics among the whole team

         4. Personas should help us find peoples in the community - they tell us what tasks they need - and then the website can be aligned to handle this

   3. For awareness, once the EC has provided feedback and approved the recommendations, the personas group will email the final doc to the other working group/standing committee chairs and will disband.
      
      

8. SGX3 web usability engagement (@Shawn Strande)

   1. Continuing discussion from December 19, 2023 meeting: https://access-ci.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ACP/pages/379092993/2023-12-19+ACCESS+EC+Meeting+Agenda+Summary

      1. will cover current status of website - and recommendations for changes to align with common standards - provide objective feedback

Items below line are deferred to next week’s agenda

9. ACCESS Infrastructure Integration Standing Committee proposed charter- @Leslie Froeschl

   1. 
      
      

10. Metrics reporting period for annual reports - (Dave)

    1. CY2023? - April 1, 2023 - March 31, 2024 or Other?

       1. Tom - yes (in concept)
          
          

11. NAIRR Pilot Update @Dave Hart

    1. NAIRR Pilot will launch on January 24

       1. With 6 initial resources:

          1. Summit - DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory

          2. Delta GPU - National Center for Supercomputing Applications

          3. Frontera - Texas Advanced Computing Center

          4. Lonestar6 - Texas Advanced Computing Center

          5. ALCF AI Testbed - DOE Argonne National Laboratory

          6. Neocortex - Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

       2. Allocations WG has been formed

          • Dave/John have been leading

          • Dave is the liaison between the RPs

       3. Proposals will be accepted until March 1, 2024.

          1. More resources are expected to be looped-in after and opportunities will eventually re-open.

       4. It’s expected that an RFI will be included in parallel to the allocations submission window.

       5. The theme for projects will be: Safe, Secure and Trustworthy AI

          • Testing, evaluating, verifying, and validating AI systems.

          • Improving accuracy, validity, and reliability of model performance, while controlling bias.

          • Increasing the interpretability and privacy of learned models.

          • Reducing the vulnerability of models to families of adversarial attacks.

          • Advancing capabilities for assuring that model functionality aligns with societal values and obeys safety guarantees ​

       6. The process will be quite similar to the COVID19 consortium.

12. Informational Items (10 mins)

    1. Allocations Stephen Deems

       1. A series of questions

          1. Presenting ACCESS Annual Metrics

             1. Would it be best to present calendar year? program year? …fiscal year?

             2. Calendar year would be the preference from Allocations.

             3. Would like to sync this with other teams before we go into annual report/review season.

          2. Question regarding ACCESS PEARC24 Plans

             1. BOF? Workshop? Are we thinking of anything here?

          3. Allocations Notifications

             1. Sharing a Google doc with notifications that go out to folks who request allocations.

             2. Looking for recommendations on how we can improve these, or better highlight specific areas of interest for each ACCESS team.

             3. Open question: Should we discuss a broader notifications strategy?

                1. e.g. after someone creates an account?

    2. MATCH Shelley Knuth

       1. Discussing feedback from the feedback forums; determining how to incorporate feedback

       2. CU Boulder has been selected for funding as one of NSF’s inaugural Regional Innovation Engines. My group is directly participating, and during the site visit I did note the connection we have to ACCESS. Still more to come.

    3. CONECT Tim Boerner

       1. The STEP program is accepting applications for the 2024-25 cohort of students through March 1, 2024. Please help spread the word!

    4. MMS Tom Furlani

       1. Provided Tom G / NSF with a brief document summarizing the current state of RP reporting to ACCESS MMS. The primary reporting data consists of accounting data (usage) and job level performance data, including application metadata. The summary was broken out by each resource provider in terms of which data is currently reported and how that data is transmitted.

    5. OpenCI John Towns

       1. Submitted IRB for surveys.

       2. EAB Chair Report Received

       3. External evaluator presented feedback from Dec focus group discussion

Misc Topics:

1. Tapia Conference—Sep. 18-20, 2024—San Diego

   1. Should ACCESS be a supporter? staff a table?

2. MFA for Atlassian Confluence and Jira @Leslie Froeschl - approved

   1. Email sent to EC - 1/25/2024

   2. ACCESS Cybersecurity has asked if it would be possible to enable MFA/Two Factor Authentication on Confluence and JIRA.

      We have not had a problem with unauthorized access up to this point, but they would like to be prepared in advance of any attempts.

      Users will not experience any changes for public access sites.

      For sites that currently require logging in – people would just have the additional step to complete authentication.

   3. Is this something you would agree to or would you like this added as a discussion item to the next EC agenda?

   4. Approved via email:

      1. CONECT - Leslie Froeschl - Approved

      2. OpenCI - John Towns - Approved

      3. MATCH - Shelley Knuth - Approved

      4. Allocations - Stephen Deems - Approved

      5. MMS - Tom Furlani - Approved

• Reconciliation of difference between too many meetings vs EAB perception that there is too much siloed work

• Risk Management progress = change in likelihood due to mitigation efforts?

• Horizontal Leadership progress = compromises?