XSEDE

XSEDE
Name	Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment
Founded	01 July 2011
Location	United States
Focus	Cyberinfrastructure, High-performance computing
Key people	John Towns (Project Director)
Website	www.xsede.org

XSEDE. The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment was a major cyberinfrastructure project funded by the National Science Foundation to create a single, virtual system for accessing advanced computational resources across the United States. It integrated supercomputers, data storage systems, and specialized instruments from multiple service providers, enabling researchers to tackle complex problems in fields ranging from astrophysics to genomics. The project served as a cornerstone of the NSF's strategy to provide a comprehensive national digital infrastructure for open scientific research.

Overview

XSEDE functioned as a coordinated ecosystem, federating resources from leading academic institutions and national laboratories such as the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Its primary mission was to democratize access to world-class computational science tools, allowing researchers from any discipline or institution to apply for allocations of processing time and storage. The environment supported a vast portfolio of scientific computing applications, facilitating discoveries in climate modeling, materials science, and bioinformatics. By providing a unified portal and support services, it significantly lowered the barrier to entry for using advanced cyberinfrastructure.

History and development

The project was launched in July 2011 as a five-year, $121 million award from the National Science Foundation, succeeding and expanding upon the prior TeraGrid project. Its development was led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in partnership with a consortium that included the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas at Austin. A key goal was to evolve beyond the centralized model of TeraGrid to a more extensible and service-oriented architecture. In 2016, XSEDE received a second five-year renewal, continuing its operations until the transition to the next-generation NSF program, the Access to Advanced Cyberinfrastructure initiative, began its planning phase.

Resources and services

The integrated resources comprised some of the most powerful supercomputing systems in the world for open science, including Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Comet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Bridges at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Services extended beyond raw compute cycles to encompass large-scale data analytics platforms, high-performance cloud computing testbeds, and visualization resources like those at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The project also operated a central resource allocation system, the XSEDE Resource Allocation Service, which managed the peer-reviewed distribution of resource grants to thousands of researchers annually.

Software and tools

To streamline the user experience, XSEDE developed and supported a suite of software tools and middleware. This included the XSEDE User Portal for unified access, the XPBS job submission system, and the Globus toolkit for secure, high-performance data transfer. The project maintained extensive software collections on its systems, optimizing popular scientific codes for its diverse high-performance computing architectures. It also offered training through virtual workshops and in-person events like the XSEDE HPC Workshop series, empowering users to effectively leverage parallel computing libraries and programming models such as MPI and OpenMP.

Impact and usage

The environment supported over 20,000 researchers from more than 2,000 institutions, enabling groundbreaking work across the STEM spectrum. Notable projects included large-scale simulations of galaxy formation conducted by teams at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, advanced protein folding research relevant to drug discovery, and high-resolution models of hurricane paths developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The annual XSEDE Conference became a key forum for the computational science community to share results and methodologies, further amplifying the project's impact on the national research enterprise.

Governance and funding

Governance was structured around a lead institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with principal investigators and co-principal investigators from across the partner consortium. Strategic direction was provided by an executive committee and external advisory boards comprising leaders from industry, academia, and government agencies. Primary funding was provided through cooperative agreements from the National Science Foundation's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, with significant cost-sharing and in-kind contributions from the resource provider sites. This model ensured that the infrastructure remained aligned with the evolving needs of the broader scientific community in the United States.

Category:High-performance computing Category:National Science Foundation Category:Cyberinfrastructure Category:Scientific computing