The Strategic Applications Program: An Update

By Herbert Morgan, NCSA

The Strategic Applications Program (SAP) came into being about a year ago as a means for those making use of NCSA resources to define clear projects with NCSA staff to assist them in more efficiently and more effectively accomplishing their science and engineering goals.

NCSA realized that many members of its user community were not aware of the services that NCSA provides in this area, ranging form code optimization to visualization. With the right mechanism in place, users can more effectively make use of these services to, for example, optimize their code and thus help them grow their usage in order to aid their research. "To a certain extent, NCSA was already doing that, but mostly in an ad hoc fashion," said John Towns, Director of NCSA's Scientific Computing Division. "Given that we only have so many staff members, I wanted a mechanism [whereby] people could ask for that help in conjunction with some help for figuring out how to ask for it because usually they are not very experienced."

The SAP is also intended to be a mechanism to evaluate what NCSA already does, to extract the success stories, and to share them with users other than those directly involved. Without SAP a performance engineering staff member, for example, works with a user to accomplish something and then goes on about his or her business. While that particular user is helped, any potential benefit to other users is potentially lost.

Through SAP that nugget of success can be shared with others who may also benefit. "I wanted a mechanism," said Towns, "that would allow us to pull those successes out and feed [them] into both Access articles or data link articles, depending on the type of success."

SAP project results will be disseminated to the broader NCSA user community in the form of new methodologies, software, and algorithms provided as online information. The SAP Web pages provide a place for users to see what's going on and to realize that help and encouragement are available at NCSA. These projects may further develop as papers for technical conferences or tutorial material for workshops.

Current Status of SAP

Although the program was implemented in the fall of 2002, momentum was lost because, among other things, the SAP coordinator left NCSA, according to Towns. The new coordinator Nahil Sobh, who also manages the Performance Engineering and Computational Methods (PECM) group, is compiling a list of projects in progress to be posted to the SAP Web pages. Sobh is also making a list of users who have expressed an interest in participating in SAP.

While Sobh is the point man for the program, SAP is not just about performance engineering. Dave Semeraro, division manager of the Visualization and Virtual Environments group, also has interactions with users in doing visualization projects. He is currently initiating several SAP projects with various research groups. Other areas in NCSA could also fall under the SAP umbrella.

What determines this umbrella coverage? SAP is targeted at smaller research groups that have large computational needs but need NCSA staff expertise to assist in areas such as code optimization, visualization, and data management. Typically, smaller research groups that have significant computational requirements do not have the flexibility in their budgets. They need some assistance.

Additionally, SAP projects may develop because some larger research groups do not have certain expertise. NCSA staff members provide the expertise needed to fill in these gaps.

The SAP Objective

The ultimate objective of SAP is to help NCSA users. This help comes in the form of having staff specifically available to work with users' applications in various capacities. It also comes in the form of making their use of NCSA resources more effective, which, according to Towns, "is at the root of what we are trying to do-enable their science through effective use of our resources."

For more information about SAP project attributes and procedures, as well as a sample SAP project, see the Strategic Applications Program Web site.