Notes from EOT call of September 11 2007
From TeraGrid Wiki
EOT Working Group Call - September 11, 2007 - Summary
Participants: Scott Lathrop, Jeff Sale, Ange Mason, Laura McGinnis, Daphne Siefert-Herron, Kay Hunt, Sandie Kappes, Diane Baxter, John Cobb
Action Items
- Send info on any education, outreach and training events that should be posted on the web site for broad dissemination
- Seminar Series
- Sandie Kappes to send URL for submitting TeraGrid seminar presentations
- Scott to ask Dane about speaking at the October TeraGrid seminar
- Jeff and Ange to setup submission site for FacultyTECH/Education seminars
- Sandie to send info about Graduate Research Fellows Program
- Metrics
- all RPs to collect info for all people that have benefitted from TeraGrid training
- all RPs to collect info on courses that use TeraGrid resources
- MSI Workshop - let Sandie Kappes know if you want to be part of the planning for an MSI workshop - skappes@ncsa.uiuc.edu
- Post Professional Society meetings that you or others from your site are attending at http://www.teragridforum.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Speakers_Bureau
Meeting venues
We decided to use conference calls for future meetings, rather than the Access Grid, until such time as we need the Access Grid. The phone number for all future EOT working group calls is:
- Primary Dial-In: 1 (866) 628-8006
- Alternate Dial-In: 1 (630) 693-2122
- Enter Passcode: 9641250#
TeraGrid seminar series
The last CIP seminar addresses Visualization on Tuesday, Sept 18 at 1 PM Central, via Access Grid.
The seminar series will evolve into the TeraGrid Seminar Series in October. We are asking for submissions for seminars for the next year. They will occur the second Tuesday of each month. We ask that all TeraGrid sites offer the seminar and invite members of their local community to participate.
Sandie will distribute a URL to allow people to submit presentations as soon as it is ready. The Seminar Series will be highlighted on the EOT web pages.
It was suggested that Scott as Dane to kick-off the series in October.
There will be further discussion about how to make this available via web-cast to larger audiences.
FacultyTECH/Education Seminar Series
Ange and Jeff proposed that TeraGrid should offer a monthly seminar on Education related topics. These would be offered on the last Tuesday of each month at 1 PM Pacific.
IT was suggested that the seminars utilize ReadyTalk for broadcast to reach more people. Other tools like Bereze were also discussed.
[As a side note, the Wheels group is now exploring the use of ReadyTalk due to the ease of use and ability to easily record sessions for playback. Nancy has used it with Science Gateway calls and found it to be very effective.]
The first proposed speaker is Eric Jakobsson, NCSA.
The Science Gateways would be asked to talk about use of the gateways in an education setting.
Each RP is asked to submit presentations, host the monthly seminar and invite local community members to participate. SDSC, NCSA and PSC all agreed to support the plan.
Ange and Jeff to modify the TeraGrid monthly seminar submission web site to accommodate Education seminar submissions. Tim Dudek can install the submission web site.
We need to work on the marketing of the various seminars among the community to raise the awareness and benefits of the offering.
Graduate Research Fellowship Program
Sandie Kappes mentioned that planning is underway with Bill Hahn at NSF to host an Access Grid seminar on October 17. The intent is to engage the NSF funded graduate research fellows. This will be a 4 hour session on the AG with graduate students at multiple sites. The program will focus on CI resources. Sandie Kappes will send additional information to the group.
HPC Univ RAT update
A survey is in process and interviews are being conducted with numerous community members to assess community needs for HPC training.
A meeting is being held September 25-26 at PSC. Interested people may attend in person to join via Access Grid.
Check the wiki for additional information about the activities that are underway.
There is a general sense from the surveys that the community is not familiar with grid computing nor do they perceive a need for grid computing.
EOT Supplement update
We are waiting on review being conducted by NSF. We are optimistic of a Nov 1 start date if all goes well.
The scope of the effort is posted on the wiki, along with additional details about the planning. The wiki site is:
The planning group had a call September 13 and will have regular calls to continue the planning process.
Metrics of Impact of training and education on use of TeraGrid resources
Need: collect data on people attending training/workshop events and on-line tutorials to assess:
- do attendees become users, increase use, submit DACs, etc.?
- how many education courses/projects use TeraGrid resources?
- how else can we measure the impact?
We discussed having each RP collect information about people that have benefitted from training activities to ascertain how the training has impacted their status as a TeraGrid user. We recognize that it takes time for change, so we need to look at change over the span of at least a year to assess impact.
Each RP will collect the following information over the past year of people that have attended training events or used on-line tutorials.
- Name of person
- e-mail of person
- Institution
- Course/topic taken (in person or on-line)
- Date course/topic taken
We will collect all of this data and compare it to the TeraGrid Central Database (TGCDB) to ascertain:
- were they a TeraGrid user before the course?
- did they become a user after the course?
- did their usage change (increase) after the course/topic
- did they request a larger allocation after the course/topic
- did they enroll in another course/topic
- were they never a TeraGrid user (before or after)
The results will be anonymized, and used to make correlations between the training offered by TeraGrid and its impact on the user community's use of TeraGrid resources.
Similarly, we want to collect all available data on any courses that have allocations for use by their students. We'll assess the level of use of TeraGrid resources by the course.
It was also recommended that we utilize a standardized evaluation form. Everyone is asked to post their evaluation forms so we can merge them into a common form. Scott will ask Gypsy Abbott, the EOT external evaluator, to work on this.
new RPs joining TeraGrid
NSF is in the process of finalizing awards to two new Resource Providers:
. Lousiana State University - Track 2 award . University of Tennessee - HPCOPS award
Scott is following up with leadership of both institutions to identify representatives to join the EOT and ER working groups.
MSI workshop
In the last EOT working group meeting we discussed NCSA's interests in launching an MSI workshop. Others expressed similar interests. It was suggested that multiple RPs could jointly offer such a workshop utilizing the Access Grid. It was also suggested that the team could built on the materials used by TACC at their summer institute.
In today's discussion Sandie agreed to contact the RPs to start the planning process. The team will discuss budget needs, length of workshop (possibly 2-3 days), content, etc.
For future meeting
We ran out of time to address the following agenda items:
- planning for years 4-5
- metaverse explorations
