In early October 2023, Wyatt Madej was selected as a Midwest Research Computing and Data Consortium Residency Fellow. On Oct 29 through Nov 4, he completed a weeklong residency at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Below is Wyatt’s summary of his visit and a description of what he learned and how he plans to implement his new-found knowledge.

It was an incredible week where I learned from some of the brightest minds in research computing. I met with experts in system engineering, data science, storage engineering, cybersecurity, programming, research consulting and facilitation, program logistics, and proposal development.

Of the many topics I had the opportunity to discuss during my time at NCSA, I was able to gain first hand insight about what it takes to operate large scale high performance computing clusters, including how software is managed, how users gain access to the hardware and software, about parallel storage and data transfer systems on clusters, and about how nodes and other infrastructure is procured for clusters. Of course, once a system is built, deployed, and is managed, it takes more work to develop training and documentation on cluster operations and access for users, which I learned about from the perspective of NCSA’s team of research facilitators. From this team, I learned about how documentation is created, how users are trained, and about the role that data science plays in research facilitation. I also learned about networking and cybersecurity, including about internal cluster networking and external networking and how the role that plays in cybersecurity. Lastly, I had the opportunity to speak with multiple members of NCSA’s proposal development team, where I learned about the ins and outs of how funding proposals are put together to fund research computing. Perhaps most importantly, I learned that the knowledge, practices, and challenges involved in each of these areas of research computing were similar and applicable at Manhattan College, just on a much different scale, making my time with NCSA even more valuable.

I also had the opportunity to tour world class datacenters and computing infrastructure, including the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Delta supercomputer and HOLL-I CS-2 from Cerebras Systemsat the National Petascale Computing Facility, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Campus Cluster.

A special thanks to Christopher Heller and Chit Khin for working to put this trip together, to the Midwest Research Computing and Data Consortium (PI Winona Snapp-Childs), and the many people (far too many to list) who took time last week to meet with me and share their expertise.

I look forward to bringing this knowledge and experience back to Manhattan College where my team is working to bring centrally and freely available research computing resources to our many student and faculty researchers with resources such as high performance computing clusters, data storage systems, and with our NSF CC* Networking award, and with my colleagues in the NYSERNet community, who I work closely with to advance research computing and cyberinfrastructure across New York State with further collaborative efforts.