Travel: ACCESS Support In-Person Staff Retreats

Customized Multi-tier Assistance, Training, and Computational Help (MATCH) provides End User Support services as part of the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program. The use of CI has become ubiquitous in research, from traditional fields such as bioinformatics, computational chemistry and astrophysics, to new areas including text interpretation, visual arts and other humanities. Along with that success, there have been significant changes to the makeup and size of the user community, improvements to the underlying compute, storage, and networking platforms used, and radically different methods by which researchers and CI professionals communicate. These changes require a rethinking of the role of user support services and how they are delivered. To address this, MATCH is implementing user support services that encourage cost-effective, scalable support that can reach a broader community. The MATCH project develops new approaches, content, services, technologies, and expertise to make it easier for NSF CI users to find and utilize the specific level and type of support needed to effectively carry out their research. The MATCH approach comprises three major themes: (1) leverage modern information delivery systems to simplify user interfaces; (2) leverage experts from the community to develop training materials and instructions that can dramatically reduce the user learning curve for several increasingly important CI computational techniques; and (3) employ a matchmaking service that will maintain a database of specialist mentors and student mentees that can be matched with projects to provide the domain-specific expertise needed to leverage ACCESS resources. The MATCH team works independently of, yet in a highly collaborative fashion with, four other teams who have been awarded roles providing ACCESS services. This award will enable increased frequency and intensity of in-person communications and coordination across these teams. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.