What is the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project?

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is a project, an institution, and a set of services. XSEDE is a virtual organization that provides a dynamic distributed infrastructure, support services, and technical expertise, enabling researchers, engineers, and scholars to address the most important and challenging problems facing the nation and world. XSEDE supports a growing collection of advanced computing, high-end visualization, data analysis, and other resources and services. XSEDE is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

As a project, XSEDE is a five-year, $121 million grant award made by the NSF to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois and its partners via program solicitation NSF 08-571. XSEDE is a successor to the NSF-funded TeraGrid project, which itself succeeded the NSF supercomputer center program that began in the 1980s.

As an institution, XSEDE is a collaboration led by NCSA and 18 partner organizations to deliver a series of instantiations of services, each instantiation being developed through a formal systems engineering process.

As a set of services, XSEDE integrates supercomputers, visualization and data analysis resources, data collections, and software into a single virtual system for enhancing the productivity of scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanities experts. XSEDE facilitates scientific discovery by providing common authentication and security mechanisms, global namespace and file systems, remote job submission and monitoring, file transfer services, advanced support services, and a user portal designed to help researchers work as efficiently and effectively as possible. XSEDE's suite of advanced digital services connects with other high-end facilities and campus-based resources around the US, serving as the foundation for a national computing ecosystem. Additionally, XSEDE's architecture allows open development for future digital services and enhancements.

Vision and mission

XSEDE accelerates open scientific discovery by enhancing the productivity of researchers, engineers, and scholars, and making advanced digital resources easier to use. It's goals are to:

• Deepen and extend the impact of eScience infrastructure on research and education; in particular, to reach communities that have not previously made use of it.
  
  
• Prepare the current and next generation of researchers, engineers, and scholars in the effective use of advanced digital technologies.
  
  
• Collaborate with institutions to ensure a more seamless use of the advanced technology capabilities in the national eScience infrastructure to enhance the productivity of researchers, engineers, and scholars.
  
  
• Create an open and evolving environment that facilitates integration and sharing of heterogeneous digital services into a comprehensive national eScience infrastructure.
  
  
• Expand the environment through the integration of new capabilities and resources, such as instruments and data repositories, based on the identified needs of the community.
  
  
• Deepen and expand the array of technical expertise and support services provided to the community to maximize the effectiveness of their use of the eScience infrastructure.
  
  
• Raise awareness of the value of eScience infrastructure and, in particular, the critical technical expertise and support services.

Partners

XSEDE is led by NCSA, with the following partner institutions:

• University of California Berkeley
• University of California San Diego
• Carnegie Mellon University
• University of Chicago
• Cornell University
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Indiana University
• Juelich Supercomputing Centre
• National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
• The Ohio State University
• University of Pittsburgh
• Purdue University
• Rice University
• Shodor Education Foundation
• Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA)
• University of Tennessee Knoxville
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Virginia

For more, see XSEDE Overview. Also:

• For a description of XSEDE allocations and how to request them, see Allocations Overview.
  
  
• To learn about requesting expert staff support for your XSEDE project to help solve a challenging science or engineering problem, see Extended Collaborative Support Services (ECSS).
  
  
• For support resources, see How do I get help with XSEDE?

This document was developed with support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant OCI-1053575. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.