The anatomy of successful ECSS projects
Melissa Romanus, Pradeep Kumar Mantha, Matt McKenzie, Thomas Connor Bishop, Emilio Gallichio, André Merzky, Yaakoub El Khamra, Shantenu Jha · 2012
The Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS) of XSEDE is a program to provide support for advanced user requirements that cannot and should not be supported via a regular ticketing system. Recently, two ECSS projects have been awarded by XSEDE management to support the high-throughput of high-performance (HTHP) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations; both of these ECSS projects use a SAGA-based Pilot-Jobs approach as the technology required to support the HTHP scenarios. Representative of the underlying ECSS philosophy, these projects were envisioned as three-way collaborations between the application stakeholders, advanced/research software development team, and the resource providers. In this paper, we describe the aims and objectives of these ECSS projects, how the deliverables have been met, and some preliminary results obtained. We believe the structure of the ECSS program enables targeted projects that address missing gaps in making distributed cyberinfrastructure systems more productive. We also describe how SAGA has been deployed on XSEDE in Community Software Area as a necessary precursor for these projects.