Campus Bridging 2015 - International Workshop on Campus Bridging: Reducing Obstacles on the Path to Big Answers

For the researcher whose experiments require large-scale cyberinfrastructure, there exists significant challenges to successful completion. These challenges are broad and go far beyond the simple issue that there are not enough large-scale resources available; these solvable issues range from a lack of documentation written for a non-technical audience to a need for greater consistency with regard to system configuration and consistent software configuration and availability on the large-scale resources at national tier supercomputing centers, with a number of other challenges existing alongside the ones mentioned here.
Campus Bridging is a relatively young discipline that aims to mitigate these issues for the academic end-user, for whom the entire process can feel like a path comprised entirely of obstacles. The solutions to these problems must by necessity include multiple approaches, with focus not only on the end user but on the system administrators responsible for supporting these resources as well as the systems themselves. These system resources include not only those at the supercomputing centers but also those that exist at the campus or departmental level and even on the personal computing devices the researcher uses to complete his or her work.
In this workshop, we will situate campus bridging within the larger context of cluster computing. Discussion will include an in-depth examination of specific issues that campus bridging attempts to resolve and some of the projects the XSEDE Campus Bridging team have completed toward the end of mitigating those challenges.