Organization of the SCINet project

Table of contents

• About
• Senior Leadership
• Executive committee
• Scientific Advisory Committee
• Policy Committee
• Scientific points of contact

About SCInet

The ARS Scientific Computing Initiative is led by an Executive Committee comprised of ARS leadership including Dr. Steven Kappes – Associate Administrator for National Programs, Dr. Simon Liu – Associate Administrator for Research Management and Operations, Dr. Debra Peters – Acting Chief Scientific Information Officer, and Stan Kosecki – Acting SCINet Program Manager. The Executive Committee is guided by security professionals, system administrators, a team of computational ARS scientists called the Scientific Advisory Committee, an HPC Policy Standing Committee, and an HPC Software Standing Committee.

The program runs three high performance computer clusters. The Ceres cluster is housed at the National Animal disease center in Ames, IA and operated by Iowa State University. The Atlas cluster is located run by Mississippi State University in Starkville, MS and a planned cluster will be housed and operated at ARS in Beltsville, MD.

User support at SCINet is provided by the Virtual Support Research Core (VSRC) operated by Iowas State University.

Senior leadership

Executive committee

The ARS Scientific Computing Initiative is led by an Executive Committee.

Scientific advisory committee

The ARS Scientific Computing Initiative is in the dominion of ARS researchers, thus the program is in a constant state of gathering and meeting their research needs. The SAC is an effort to assure that happens. SAC members represent a broad breadth of scientific research at ARS and membership includes two researchers from each of the five ARS geographic areas, a statistician member, and an “at-large” member. The SAC divides its work over various subcommittees: communications, education, planning, software and membership. In recent years, the SAC has created a quarterly SCINet newsletter, designed a user needs survey, created the scinet.usda.gov website, and held multiple computational workshops and trainings. SAC progress and issues are elevated to the Executive Committee for review and approval. For more information, including how to participate (non-members welcome), please contact Adam Rivers (chair).

Policy Committee

Formed in 2020, this committee makes recommendations to the Executive Committee on policies and procedures that are relevant to HPC operations. The committee is comprised of members from various technical backgrounds and includes representation from different ARS geographic areas. Membership also includes representatives from Iowa State University and Mississippi State University (where two of the ARS HPC systems are housed) in order to get proper representation and perspective of the issues that need to be addressed. Policy Committee progress and issues are elevated to the Executive Committee for review and approval. For more information, including how to participate, please contact Jonathan Shao (chair).

Scientific points of contact

The Scientific Point of Contact (SPOC) is the Scientific Computing Infrastructure Network (SCINet) champion for the location. Working with the SCINet Operations Team, the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) and the SAC subcommittees to ensure location personnel are familiar with SCINet and the services that are offered, the SPOC should be familiar with the scientific needs of the unit(s) at their location, especially with respect to complex data and computational needs. When the SCINet Operations Team needs information about the science requirements and needs at a location, they will contact the SPOC who is expected to interact with other scientists within the location to provide the information and recommendations to the requesting party.

The list of SPOC can be found on the USDA Sharepoint Site.