2024 Midwest RCD Annual Meeting

Come enjoy some fine food and network with your colleagues and peers.

We'll provide appetizers and soft drinks. There is a bar adjacent to the Dough Room should you decide you want to purchase something other than soft drinks.

Make Your Own Breakfast Tacos

• Scrambled eggs
• Sweet potato green chili hash
• Black beans
• Warm corn tortillas
• Pickled jalapenos
• Guacamole
• Queso fresco
• Shredded lettuce
• Salsa verde

Seasonal fresh cut fruit

Create-Your-Own Oatmeal Bar

• Steel cut oatmeal
• Berries
• Brown sugar
• Chocolate chips
• Walnuts
• Dried cranberries

Assorted Juices

Regular and decaf coffee
Hot tea - assorted tea bags
Half & half cream and assorted sugars
Almond milk
Sliced lemon

Water Pitcher Service

Pick-up your parking pass and name tag.

Overview of the Midwest RCD Consortium and opportunities it offers to consortium members. Programs galore! But, we want to hear from you: what can the consortium do for you?

This panel is being convened to have a frank discussion about funding cyberinfrastructure on our campuses. Across the Midwest, there is considerable variability in cost models. Here we uncover the variability and share our thoughts on contributing factors to successful and unsuccessful models.  

Three Ohio universities were awarded funds from the National Science Foundation to bolster the ranks of cyberinfrastructure professionals and accelerate the adoption of advanced cyberinfrastructure. This panel will discuss their comprehensive approach to developing long-term career development paths for interdisciplinary CI professionals. Through personalized training, mentoring, and hands-on experience in large research projects, the cohort of Interdisciplinary Research Machine Learning Engineers and Interdisciplinary Research Machine Learning Facilitators will gain the necessary skills to excel in their roles.

Panelists will share recent initiatives held at each campus which provided training and workforce development in AI/ML and can be considered for your institutions.

1. Karen Tomko, Ohio Supercomputer Center:  'Generative AI models for Classroom Use'
   At Ohio Supercomputer Center we are exploring the deployment of a generative AI models for classroom use. This past year, we hosted a Stable Diffusion model and made it available via Open OnDemand and Kubernetes managed resources for Digital Art and Technology students at Ohio University.
2.  Sanmukh Kuppannagari, Case Western Reserve University -'Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++'
   Intro: This hands-on workshop teaches the fundamental tools and techniques for accelerating C/C++ applications to run on massively parallel GPUs with CUDA®. Participants learn how to write code, configure code parallelization with CUDA, optimize memory migration between the CPU and GPU accelerator, and implement the workflow that they learned on a new task—accelerating a fully functional, but CPU-only, particle simulator for observable massive performance gains. At the end of the workshop, the participants get access to additional resources to create new GPU-accelerated applications on your own. Outcomes: The first workshop in the series was conducted on November 4th and 5th, 2023 with 6-hour sessions on each day. In addition to discussing the fundamentals of CUDA programming, the workshop also discussed the basics of utilizing the GPU resources on CWRU HPC and AISC. Close to 70 students participated actively in the workshop. A majority of them passed the assessment from Nvidia and obtained certifications in CUDA. The participants came from a diverse background such as business, medicine, biomedical, etc. in addition to computer science.  The workshop was well received by the students and they were enthusiastic about joining future, more advanced iterations.
3. Jane Combs, University of Cincinnati - 'P&G/UC ARC GenAI Rapid Research Challenge'
   UC's Advanced Research Computing Center team partnered with P&G's R&D Data Science and AI/ML team to host a novel event, the GenAI Rapid Research Challenge, designed to investigate how GenAI can impact research projects. Small, multi-disciplinary teams worked together, under the mentorship/advisement of P&G and UC domain and computer scientists, to propose testable concepts which solve P&G problem statements using GenAI techniques over a 1.5 day 'hackathon'.  21 participants from 9 colleges at UC participated in the event.  Participants included research faculty, postdocs, grad students and undergraduate students.  Teams were led by UC researchers as advisors/mentors, UC ARC research facilitators, P&G scientists and grad students from UC's Masters of Design program.  HPE and NVIDIA sponsored the event and provided expertise and AI platforms.

Replenish your coffee or tea
Grab a juice

Other non-perishable items from breakfast will also still be available.

People have always been a central component in cyberinfrastruture. Here Dr. Henry Neeman discusses advancements in efforts to professionalize cyberinfrastructure facilitation including the Certified Cyberinfrastructure Facilitator Training and Development (CCIFTD) program.

Wrap, Salad, Soup & Dessert Buffet
Salad bar w/ balsamic vinaigrette, ranch & caesar dressing

Mini Turkey & Brie Wrap
Mini Sirloin of Beef Wrap
Mini Grilled Vegetable Wrap (DF/VV)

Chicken & Wild Rice Soup

• Wild rice
• Brown rice
• Roasted chicken
• Carrots and onions
• Light cream stock

Vegetarian Chili

Assorted Big Ten Gourmet Cookies

• Chocolate chip
• Chocolate cherry walnut
• White chocolate macadamia
• Oatmeal raisin

Regular and decaf coffee
Hot tea - assorted tea bags
Half & half cream and assorted sugars
Almond milk
Sliced lemon

Water Pitcher Service

Patra Model Cards for ICICLE - Sachith Withana
This presentation will offer a brief description of ICICLE (Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure with Computational Learning in the Environment). We will discuss our research on developing trustworthy and accountable AI models for the edge using a framework called Patra. Patra provides semi-automated metrics capture, metadata storage through knowledge graphs, and a conversational API for user access.

CVMFS for software distribution for ICER at MSU - Joe Ryan
A brief overview of why and how we use CernVM-FS (CVMFS) to distribute software within our cluster.

Jetstream2: Cloud Computing for Everyone - Jenn Taylor
Jetstream2 strives to increase equity and inclusivity in scientific discovery by broadening the reach of cyberinfrastructure. Jetstream2's flexible, user-friendly cloud computing environment, is designed for everyone from researchers with minimal high-performance computing experience to software engineers looking for the latest in cloud-native approaches—all at no cost to the user. In this lightning talk, we’ll give an quick overview of Jetstream2 basics, benefits, possible use cases, and steps for getting started.

Invitation to join Cloud Affinity Group:
I’m reaching out to the members of the Midwest RCD Consortium to solicit interest in the Cloud Affinity Group. There is a strong foundation of research-centric clouds and HPC-adjacent cloud services at our sites and having a setting to discuss relevant cloud topics, issues, and events would strengthen our community.
Moreover, it would allow us to more easily establish and participate in Midwest RCD activities like the staff residency Indiana University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign did in 2023 to exchange ideas and practices in our respective research cloud environments. Visit the Cloud Affinity group site and consider joining the group so we can work together for a better cloud research experience overall!

Thank you, Jeremy Fischer
On behalf of the Midwest RCD Cloud Affinity Group

Partnership Story: MSI and the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain - Jim Ferguson
The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute's relationship with the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, at the University of Minnesota, is one grown out of personal relationships, trust, and a shared vision. Over the course of more than a decade, what was first a beneficial collaboration grew into a full-grown partnership that includes 7.5 FTEs at MSI helping to drive the clinical and research work at MIDB.

Adapting to AI: Large language models are expensive. Training Meta’s LLaMA model took 1 million GPU hours and cost over $2.4 million. Training an AI model is energy-consuming: it can expend more electricity than 100 US homes over an entire year, so is running the model. Industry is talking about data lakehouses to control the data faucet; the federal government is standing up NAIRR Pilot in response. The immediacy of the issue suggests that the cloud vs. on-prem decision be revisited. In this breakout we will frame the issue, then open to all manner of related issues: power efficient architectures and compute models, model optimization, risks, hybrid solutions to meet research needs. The objective is to gauge interest in producing consortium endorsed guidance.

Advanced cyberinfrastructure organizations are not immune to issues of underrepresentation that pervade the broader computing and information technology fields. What we strive to build is an inclusive and equitable culture which will promote and increase diversity. Earlier this year, we surveyed the consortium on a variety of topics related to allyship and building inclusive teams, here we present the results of that survey and offer the consortium the opportunity to further its thinking on these topics.

One of the goals of the Midwest RCD Consortium is to broaden and deepen the connectedness among members of the Midwest RCD social network. Here we jointly participate in an exercise to map out the existing Midwest RCD social network. This exercise is designed for everyone to participate!

Based on:
https://netcreate.org/index.html 

Make plans for future collaborations and mingle with colleagues (old and new). If you're leaving today, grab a to-go snack or beverage for the road.

Strawberries dipped in milk chocolate

Assorted Mini Tarts

• Key lime
• Lemon
• Blueberry tarts

Cheesecake Bites

• Assorted cheesecake flavors

Bake Shop Cookie Selection

• Butter cookies
• Ginger shortbread
• Chocolate chip
• Lemon drop

Tortilla chips with salsa and guacamole (Vegetarian)