XSEDE Starts a New Era

NSF announces details for new XSEDE 2.0 phase

The US National Science Foundation has announced a $110 million grant to XSEDE (the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) to “provide services and support for advanced computational and data-enabled research at the forefront of science and engineering.” The grant is basically a five-year plan for XSEDE to expand and develop HPC services for the US research community.

The award marks a new era in the development of XSEDE. This new “XSEDE 2.0” phase calls for the organization to take the lead on:

  • Managing and delivering services for a portfolio of supercomputers and high-end visualization and data analysis resources to address increasingly diverse scientific and engineering challenges.
  • Managing the allocation process by which researchers access advanced computing resources and continuing to improve and innovate this process in alignment with new research access workflows and new resources.
  • Building on the XSEDE tradition of outstanding user services, engaging a new generation of diverse computational researchers through education, training, outreach activities, and connecting to campus HPC communities to help researchers access local and national resources.
  • Offering extended collaborative support services that pair XSEDE computational or software engineering experts with domain scientists to strengthen a project or develop a tool needed to advance research.
  • Continuing to operate and improve XSEDE's integrated HPC capability at a national scale, providing a one-stop-shop experience for users across the XSEDE-coordinated cyberinfrastructure ecosystem.

The XSEDE community is led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and 18 partner institutions. XSEDE offers HPC resources and services to students and research scientists. For more information on working with XSEDE, see the project website.