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Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Campus Program

Northwestern University provides campus researchers with direct access to national terascale and petascale computing facilities through its participation in the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) Campus Champions program.

XSEDE, formerly known as TeraGrid, is a comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research supported by the National Science Foundation. Using high-performance network connections, XSEDE integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country providing researchers with hundreds of discipline-specific data repositories. Interconnect between the participating service providers is enabled through XSEDEnet, a network that links the core sites via 10Gb/s lines to the National LambdaRail (NLR) FrameNet in addition to Internet2.

Northwestern Campus Champions are high performance computing specialists within Northwestern IT who serve as liaisons between XSEDE and University researchers. They are available to consult with University researchers to understand the needs of the researcher and determine appropriate XSEDE resources to accommodate those research needs.  This includes assistance with Startup allocation requests, high performance computing (HPC)-related assistance with research grant proposals, and application support including porting research applications to service provider resources and scaling these to high core counts in order to increase productivity and turnaround.

Benefits to University Researchers

Through participation with the XSEDE Campus Champions program, University researchers may receive:

• Access to local, regional, and national HPC resources.
• Startup allocations on XSEDE resources.
• HPC-related assistance with research grant proposals.
• Tutorials for registered users.

Get Started

Request a Consultation

Consulting with a Northwestern XSEDE Campus Champion is strongly recommended to determine the XSEDE resources necessary for a research project and to gain access to Startup allocations on XSEDE. Request a consultation. 

Create an XSEDE Account

Once the appropriate XSEDE resources have been identified, a researcher will need to create an XSEDE User Portal Account (XUP) to obtain a unique ID and password. The XUP gives registered users access to the XSEDE portal services and is used as an identifier across the network. Services accessible through the XSEDE User Portal include:

• Allocation request submission capability
• Up-to-date account information including allocated resources and usage
• Interfaces for data transfers, data collections, and other user tasks and resources
• XSEDE news and announcements
• Training class registration and schedule
• Access to the XSEDE Help Desk and User Forums

Last Updated: 13 February 2019