Strategic Plan

Center for Institutional Research Computing (CIRC)
Washington State University

Vision

The Center for Institutional Research Computing (CIRC) supports WSU’s mission to advance, extend, and apply knowledge through its commitment to the land-grant heritage and tradition of service to society.  CIRC develops and supports research computing infrastructure (hardware, software, and human capital) to advance cutting-edge computation-based research at WSU, with the goal of expanding the research enterprise and facilitating growth in computational expertise across the WSU research community.  CIRC broadens participation in the research endeavor among stakeholders at WSU as well as partner institutions in the Pacific Northwest.

Mission

The mission of the Center for Institutional Research Computing (CIRC) is to provide high-performance computing (HPC) resources and expertise to advance computational and data-intensive research across WSU. CIRC’s mandate is to create and administer a state-of-the-art HPC cluster facility and to provide responsive user support and guidance in its effective use, in order to best meet the increasing needs of research computing at WSU. To ensure the broadest impact on the research community, the HPC resources are available for use in research by all faculty, students, and staff at any of WSU’s campuses, at no cost.

Landscape of Research Computing at WSU

A large number of faculty, staff, and students at WSU rely on high-performance computing to meet their research needs in areas such as molecular biology, chemistry and physics, horticulture, environmental modeling, and natural resource management. The applications involve computations that are large-scale, complex, and data-intensive, ranging from molecular and physics ab-initio simulations to genomics sequencing and AI inference and training, the demands of which exceed conventional computational facilities.

Goals & Objectives:

The goal of CIRC is to support WSU’s research computing ecosystem and to identify and implement strategies that increase collaboration, competitiveness, and impact. Toward that end, we have identified the following key objectives.

Objective 1. Research Computing Infrastructure.
Ensure a robust and sustainable computing infrastructure that consists of hardware, software, and technical staff that creates computational literacy and enhances productivity and learning.

Strategy 1.1: Build continuous support for CIRC staffing needs among WSU administrators.
Strategy 1.2: Build continuous funding support for infrastructure through PI- and CIRC-driven external funding requests, to ensure fiscal sustainability.
Strategy 1.3: Continuously incorporate the latest advances in HPC technology to provide state-of-the-art resources that can best meet the increasing needs of research computing at WSU.
Strategy 1.4: Maximize the availability of HPC cluster resources through continuous maintenance and monitoring, as well as redundant and fault-tolerant mechanisms for network and storage that ensure uptime and data integrity.
Strategy 1.5: Ensure sustainability of the HPC facility in the face of disaster recovery and staff availability through (a) online documentation of all policies and procedures for systems software and hardware installation as well as financial and personnel management, (b) cross-training of staff, and (c) redundant administrative access to all systems for select ITS staff.
Strategy 1.6:  Maintain regular communications with WSU system IT leadership to better coordinate infrastructure needs required to support growing system-wide HPC demands.

Objective 2. User Support Services.

Strategy 2.1: Provide responsive user support through a well-trained staff that assists and guides users in application development and deployment, and the effective use of HPC resources.
Strategy 2.2: Assist and advise faculty, post-docs, and students about technical details for optimizing HPC resources with myriad research problems and grant applications utilizing local HPC resources, as well as proposals seeking national computational resources on NSF ACCESS and other leadership computing facilities (LCFs).
Strategy 2.3: Maximize the efficacy of user support through responsive online mechanisms to submit and handle service requests, including Atlassian Service Desk tickets and interactive Zoom Help Desk sessions.
Strategy 2.4: Enhance and simplify the user experience through the provision of application software for a wide spectrum of domains including genomics, simulation and modeling, and AI training and inference, as well as through web portals that make it easy to access and manage job submissions.

Objective 3. Outreach and Engagement.
Support the growth and advancement of research computing throughout the WSU system through outreach programs that foster computational literacy, increase participation, and facilitate new partnerships.

Strategy 3.1: Enable and maintain free access to HPC computing resources and user support services for all WSU researchers so as to have the broadest impact on facilitating computationally-intensive research.
Strategy 3.2: Provide technical and organizational support for university-wide training workshops and student engagement, including WSU HPC club as well as R and Python working groups.
Strategy 3.3: Provide regular user communications through newsletters, mailing lists, WSU/OR news postings, and websites, in order to keep current and prospective users appraised of locally as well nationally available HPC resources, conferences, and grant opportunities.
Strategy 3.4: Actively participate in outreach and education at university-wide informational events, such as those sponsored by the Office of Research, to broaden participation and increase awareness about various HPC resources available to the WSU research community.
Strategy 3.5: Actively engage with the WSU community and administrative units to promote, create, and sustain an inclusive campus and community environment through education with a special focus on bringing HPC enabled capacities to diverse creative efforts. 
Strategy 3.6: Liaison with external HPC resources available to researchers, including the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC), and NSF ACCESS (formerly XSEDE).
Strategy 3.7: Periodically survey college and system member research leadership to better anticipate growing HPC needs and future growth, including possible startup investments and changing needs.
Strategy 3.8: Provide faculty recruiting support to colleges and departments for potential new hires to communicate the capacities and investment opportunities in Kamiak.

Objective 4. Faculty Governance.
Dynamically respond to the changing research portfolio of WSU though a mechanism of faculty governance and regular assessment in order to guide and maximize CIRC’s contributions to the research enterprise. This is key to ensuring that the provided HPC resources and services align with the research computing needs of WSU faculty.

Strategy 4.1: Continuously promote faculty governance of CIRC, and engage faculty across WSU through outreach to academic units to assess needs.
Strategy 4.2:  Maintain and support faculty Advisory and Sustainability Committees to provide continuous faculty guidance and oversight on important strategic decisions relating to CIRC policy and investment directions.  
Strategy 4.3: Conduct semi-regular surveys of faculty and research staff in order to assess user satisfaction, needs, and growth, and to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).

Outcomes

This plan outlines the general goals and objectives of CIRC.  More detail is provided in the following sections on WSU’s research portfolio, research infrastructure plan, and research computing user community. Assessment of activities undertaken to achieve the strategic plan will occur through feedback mechanisms built into Objective 2 and Objective 3, where participants and the WSU research computing community can provide feedback on the resources and support activities of CIRC.

Ultimately, this plan supports the goal of making WSU a successful and outstanding Land Grant Institution. It supports expanded research, scholarship and creative activities; graduate education and student experience; outreach and extension advancing quality of life, economic development, sustainability, and equity. It also supports institutional effectiveness and infrastructure in our multicampus environment.  Importantly, this plan supports faculty and staff retention and recruitment of outstanding new faculty, staff, post-doc researchers and graduate students and in growing WSU’s entire research portfolio.

Supplementary Documents

CIRC Strategic Plan 2024 – supporting documents