Academic Associates Program at SDSC Launches New Website

Published 08/08/2005

The Academic Associates Program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego has rolled out a new Website to provide improved service to University of California researchers who access SDSC resources under the program. "We've incorporated a number of good suggestions from users," said Subhashini Sivagnanam, Coordinator of the AAP at SDSC. "The new site will help researchers get the most out of large-scale SDSC resources." The website can be viewed at http://www.sdsc.edu/us/aap.

The Academic Associate Program, begun in 1995, gives researchers at UC campuses access to an array of high-end services and resources at SDSC that are beyond the scale of those available on their home campus, including supercomputing time, storage resources, and training classes. But perhaps the most important benefit available to AAP users is access to technical consulting by expert SDSC staff. Consultants are available to help with any technical question, from logging in and running an application to parallelizing and optimizing a code. Other benefits include priority seating at SDSC workshops, workshops conducted for AAP users at their campus, and one to two week internship programs for selected research groups, one per UC campus each year.

The AAP currently has over 150 users with accounts on large SDSC resources, including the DataStar supercomputer, the TeraGrid, and the 6 petabyte High Performance Storage System (HPSS) for archival tape storage.

The new website, developed by Sivagnanam with Diana Diehl and Tim Gumto of the SDSC Documentation and Portals group, has features for efficient navigation, and also includes:

• A renewal form to make it easy for users to extend their access to resources.
• An improved FAQ to help users get started and resolve questions.
• A feedback form to encourage user suggestions to further improve the program.
• Help with selecting the right computing or storage resource, which many users requested.

The AAP is available for any qualified UC researcher with a need for massive computational power and larger storage and archiving space. The campuses involved are Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego (main campus, School of Medicine, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography), Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco.