Community
EPOC delivers appropriate end-to-end user support and engineering solutions and is also a central community hub ready to provide personal expertise and assistance on an ongoing basis. Through our targeted partnerships, EPOC has the potential to benefit nearly all of US science, research, and education on a far broader scale than any one organization can accomplish alone.
Many researchers at larger educational institutions, or part of large-scale collaborations, already have access to significant in-house resources, so we focus on small or medium-sized institutions and collaborations that may lack the financial and human resource capacity for more advanced services. By working with the regional networks to develop, teach, and make available additional instructive material to these institutions, we are not only increasing the abilities of the teams we are in direct contact with, but we are also providing a broad set of materials made freely available to the general public.
EPOC’s collaborators include regional network partners, with whom we will develop a sustainable approach to support services. The current regional network partners include
The Indiana State Network (I-Light)
Keystone Initiative for Network Based Education and Research (KINBER)
The Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN)
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration N-Wave Project (N-Wave)
Ohio State R&E Network (OARnet)
Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP)
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
We have also identified a set of Infrastructure Partners who themselves provide services to end user scientists to expand the set of services available to the community, including:
- Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRCC), a consortium of over 30 campuses that facilitate access to cyberinfrastructure.
- The National Science Foundation Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCOE), which supports cybersecurity for NSF funded projects.
- Internet2, which supports solving common technology challenges for their over 200 educational, research, and community members.
- The Quilt, which provides a central organization for networks to share the best practices to support end user science.
- Science Gateway Community Institute (SGCI), which provides best practice recommendations and support for scientists building and using data portals.
- The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which supports a single virtual system and expertise through the Campus Champions.
In addition, our science community partners, each of which comprises a collaboration of scientists, allow us to scale our reach to entire community groups. These partners include:
- Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), a consortium of over 180 members that provides a forum for the Earth science data and technology community.
- The University of Hawai’i System Astronomy Community, which supports 15 facilities with hundreds of researchers and experiments every year.
- Midwest Big Data Hub (MBDH), which supports the use of data for a variety of applications and end users across 12 states.
EPOC has the potential to be transformational to science and education by providing not only a depth understanding to achieve better data transfers but also the human expertise needed to make the most of research collaborations.