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SciDAC Outreach Center Offers Information and Support
The SciDAC Outreach Center provides information and services that support the outreach, training, and research objectives of the SciDAC program. These outreach activities serve to bring SciDAC-supported technologies to new audiences through a variety of in-person and electronic services. In addition to training, the Center provides innovative information and software services to SciDAC projects. These services can make SciDAC technology more approachable and more easily adopted. Source code control systems, online surveys, email lists, web-hosting, and web application development are currently provided to SciDAC projects based on their needs.
Figure 5. SciDAC 2007 conference participants explore the matrix of cross-project interactions and find opportunities for new collaborations.
The SciDAC Outreach Center also operates a first-level support and Q&A line for matters related to SciDAC and DOE high-performance computing. The center fields a wide range of questions from interested parties, often providing answers and initiating dialogs with the appropriate SciDAC researchers. Providing a single point of contact for "all things SciDAC" has been successful strategy for putting the appropriate parties in contact with each other.
Targeted in-person outreach is also part of the center's activities. At the SciDAC 2007 meeting in Boston, MA (figure 5), the Outreach Center leveraged the gathering of researchers and specialists to provide tutorials on SciDAC technologies. The Outreach Center piggybacked an extra day of tutorials onto the main meeting. Nearly 100 students and post-docs spent the day learning how SciDAC-supported technologies can deliver results for their research. In addition to coordinating the tutorials, the Center helped plan content based on stated interests of registrants, provided a limited number of travel stipends, and conducted a follow-up survey of participants to help shape future in-person outreach activities.
The following are some of the activities and goals the Outreach Center has planned for Fiscal Year 2008:

  • Generalizing software hosting and testing services via a web-based Gforge portal

  • Continuing in-person outreach events through tutorials and coordinating with existing conferences

  • Delivering original web content that demonstrates SciDAC technologies in novel application areas

  • Extending collaborative development services to new SciDAC projects

  • Providing software packaging and dissemination services to SciDAC Centers and Institutes
Figure 6. Collaborations between the Centers and Institutes and the Science Application areas.
The Outreach Center is interested in your feedback and ideas for how to make SciDAC-2 as successful as possible. The SciDAC Outreach Center looks forward to hearing from you!

Contacts
1-866-470-5547
help@outreach.SciDAC.gov

Further Information
http://outreach.scidac.gov

 

Published by IOP Publishing in association with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for the US Department of Energy, Office of Science. Copyright © 2007 by IOP.