Roadmap: Sid & IQSS Research Computing
Sid Verba was a beloved professor who unified disparate groups and made Harvard better. Sid is our branding of the Open OnDemand software to unify and enhance the research computing user experience at Harvard.
The Strategic Goals of the Sid Project are our highest-level guide.
Our goals are the following:
- 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 via a multitenant secure research environment (FASSE) and scalable set of compute nodes (Cannon) in collaboration with Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing group (FASRC) as well as VM support via the New England Research Cloud (NERC).
- Orient the Sid branding of the Open OnDemand platform to benefit the user experience for all FASRC 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.
The following roadmap shows our accomplishments during the 2024-2025 academic year and our anticipated projects and activities during the 2025-2026 academic year.
Our primary projects for 2025-2026
Highlights among the above roadmap are the following:
- User experience research and usability testing
- Expand and improve research computing documentation
- Configure additional features on Sid (Open OnDemand)
- Continued automation of IQSS metrics
- Developing and deploying the LOOP application
- Open OnDemand community involvement
- Automate hosting of SlaveVoyages web site on NERC
- Continued collaboration on Okta integration for FASRC