UREP Prioritization Results for January 2018

During December 2017 and January 2018 the UREP reviewed a set of seventeen newly proposed use cases for the XSEDE system and rated their importance in light of the community’s needs. The proposed use cases came from a variety of sources, including the Community Engagement & Enrichment (CEE) team, discussions at conferences, staff proposals, and a project-wide needs analysis. At this time, the UREP is comprised of roughly ⅓ XSEDE staff (all WBS areas), ⅓ campus champions, and ⅓ User Advisory Committee members, with a total of 37 members. Twenty members provided ratings. The details, summarized below, can be viewed in the Community Software Repository.  Beyond a simple numeric rating, UREP members also provided useful and insightful comments clarifying their views on the importance of each proposed feature. This guidance from the UREP will now inform the work planned and conducted by XSEDE staff members, helping us focus our work on activities that provide high value to the community.

The results indicate a higher-than-average priority for a specific security incident response feature: a secure tool in the XSEDE User Portal for identifying SP resources where a given individual has an active account. The UREP confirmed the value of a larger set of activities, including a “guided” resource discovery feature for prospective XSEDE users, an emergency account suspension tool for security incidents, the ability for allocation PIs to limit use of their allocation by individual team members (requested by campus champions and large research collaborations), the ability for educators to allow students to login to systems (mostly VMs) using XSEDE and campus authentication services, and modest steps to broaden XSEDE’s support for groups beyond allocation management. The UREP also recommended that we proceed--as time and circumstances allow--with a few other activities, including: the ability to use XSEDE authentication with OpenStack cloud APIs wherever offered by SPs, and any additional group features that can be accomplished without significant expense or effort.

We are grateful to the UREP for their time and effort considering these proposals and reflecting on their value to the XSEDE community, and also thank the CEE team for for recording and forward user requirements gathered from their activities.