Roadmap: Sid Research Computing Environment Next Generation

Sid RCE Next Gen

The Strategic Goals of the Sid Project are our highest-level guide.  

Our goals:

  •  Provide focused researcher support to the social science community with an emphasis on improving the user experience for researchers working with sensitive data.
  • Support IQSS users with an expanded backend infrastructure (i.e. VMs, DBs, …) and a multitenant secure research environment in collaboration with Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing group (FASRC).
  •  Re-orient the Sid research platform features to benefit the user experience for all FAS RC High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster users.
  • Lead development of research computing based Software Products that support a broad scope of researchers across the Harvard Community.
  • Provide access to additional Harvard apps such as Dataverse and Worldmap from a common framework.
  • Participate in the HPC open source community, focused on the Open OnDemand HPC User Interface.

Throughout the year, we'll identify big steps that we can take to focus on one or more of these goals. These big steps are detailed on our Roadmap, below.

The big things the team is working on right now are shown in the Implementation section. In the Planning/Design section, you can see those strategic items that we've prioritized. In the Future section, you'll see the things that we'd like to work on but haven't yet prioritized. 

Implementation

Q3 2020 Preparation for the migration of Sid cloud computing and RCE projects to Cannon

  • Continued close collaboration with FAS RC (ongoing)
  • Joint preparation for the migration of our IQSS Research Compute Environment users to Cannon.
  • Initial exploration of the Open OnDemand (OOD) platform and collaboration with the Open OnDemand team.
  • Participate in FAS RC design of the first FAS Multitenant L3 environment supporting sensitive datasets.
  • Ongoing preparation for the retirement of the IQSS RCE datacenter.

Q4 2020 Multitenant L3 environment available in Cannon

  • Cannon Multitenant environment operational with initial OOD Landing page branding.
  • Initial Sid and RCE project migrations done.
  • Initial collaboration with OOD team.
  • UX research on Gen 1 customized OOD begins

Planning/Design

Q1 2021 Migration of Sid cloud computing and RCE projects to Cannon

  • Sid and RCE projects migrated to Cannon Multitenant L3 Environment.
  • Work with FAS RC on the rollout of the OOD 2.0 to Cannon and to the Multitentant L3 environment.
  • Continued exploration of the Open OnDemand platform and collaboration with the Open OnDemand team.
  • Continue UX research and prototyping of Gen 1 customized OOD

Q2 2021 IQSS hosted compute platforms retired

  • Last stragglers migrated to Cannon.
  • Last of the servers in the IQSS datacenter retired or migrated to another platform.
  • RCE and Sid Cloud Platform retired

Q2 2021

  • Work with FAS RC to provide researchers access to broader set of installed applications.
  • Releases of customized OOD UX begin

Upcoming Items

Further Collaboration

  • UI Integration to common authentication (i.e. HKey, CAS / Keycloak)
  • Persistent desktop beyond session reconnection.

 

Sid and RCE migration: project information

 

IQSS will be launching Sid, the next generation of the Research Computing Environment this fall and winter.

 

Sid, the next generation RCE will be implemented in a series of phases with the first one being a migration of projects from the Sid Cloud Platform and RCE platform to a new environment and the second phase a continuous roll out of new features focused on improving the user experience for Harvard researchers. 

 

The new environment will provide the same features you are used to, for example running batch and interactive jobs and collaborating with other researchers. New features include a new user interface to access cluster-computing and storage resources and increased computing capacity through access to the FAS Research Computing (FASRC) Cannon cluster, a large-scale HPC (high performance computing) cluster supporting scientific modeling and simulation.

 

IQSS continues to offer access to high-performance machines through its on-premise labs, data science consulting services, specialized social science research computing support, and data science products that the Harvard social science community has come to rely on.

 

For the next generation RCE services, IQSS will collaborate more closely with FAS Research Computing to support innovation and development of new data science tools as well as jointly participate with colleagues throughout the university and research community on open source efforts, such as Dataverse and Open OnDemand with an improved Sid User Interface.

Sid and RCE migration: FAQ

What is being migrated?

All active projects on both the RCE and Sid will be migrated to Cannon. This includes accounts of PIs and researchers and the corresponding datasets. We will be working with FASRC to house all projects, including Level 3 projects, in accordance with Harvard’s Information Security Policies.

When is this happening?

We expect to start migrating projects later this Fall.

What do I have to do right now?

Nothing at this moment. We understand that this may be the first time that you are hearing about this. Our first priority is the least impact to your research. We’ll be talking with each project’s Principal Investigator (PI) and project owner to determine the best course of action for each project.

Where can I get additional information about the project?

When we have more information about the project and migration this page will be updated. If you have any questions about the upcoming migration, feel free to contact Len Wisniewski, IQSS Director of Engineering, lwisniewski@iq.harvard.edu, or Mercè Crosas, IQSS Chief Data Science and Technology Officer, mcrosas@iq.harvard.edu.