The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) will be a partner on a major, five-year project by the U.S. National Science Foundation to develop a next-generation system for awarding computing time for the network of supercomputers funded primarily by the NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.

The $7.5 million Resource Allocations Marketplace and Platform Services (RAMPS) project will be led by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a joint program of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. NCAR and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will be partner organizations.

RAMPS is part of NSF’s new ACCESS (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem Services and Support) program, which will manage a range of services that support a national federation of NSF supercomputers and related resources. It will democratize the allocations, deliver user support and operate other infrastructure elements essential to providing high-performance computing to U.S. investigators and their collaborators. As part of ACCESS, RAMPS will allocate time for this federation of NSF-funded resources and operate a software platform that supports allocations processes for additional resources, including NCAR’s Derecho supercomputer and NSF’s Lower Atmosphere Observing Facilities.

 “The RAMPS team is excited to have this chance to take these allocations processes to the next level,” said David Hart of NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory and RAMPS co-principal investigator. “Not only do we get to spin up a new marketplace experience for the research community, but we also will pursue a suite of innovative pilot activities to advance and extend the capabilities of the allocations environment. And all of the RAMPS activities will be guided by a focus on supporting the diversity of the research community, the equity of the allocations processes, and the inclusiveness of the environment that we build.”

The RAMPS project will begin preparing to assume responsibility for the allocations process on May 1.

For more about RAMPS, see the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center news release.

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