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The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego has opened registration for the Fifth National Research Platform (5NRP), a workshop that begins with hands-on tutorials March 19 and runs through March 22, 2024. It will highlight cyberinfrastructure collaboration and examine opportunities for designing and implementing future-forward cyber capabilities for research and education communities. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the central theme of this year’s workshop.

The workshop is sponsored by the National Research Platform (NRP), a partnership of more than 50 institutions, led by researchers, engineers and cyberinfrastructure (CI) professionals, and supported in part by major awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

5NRP will overlap with another workshop, FABRIC KNIT 8, which also begins March 19. The registrations are separate, but both workshops will be held at UC San Diego.

“These two events are co-located so that researchers and educators can come together in one place to make plans for enabling collaborations that require large-scale cyberinfrastructure,” explained Frank Würthwein, SDSC director, NRP leader and FABRIC board member. “To facilitate interaction, we will offer joint sessions, a demo night on Tuesday, March 19, and a social event on Wednesday evening for participants from both workshops to engage with one another.”

Würthwein called attention to the hands-on tutorials for NRP, Expanse and Voyager, including explanations of the commonalities and differences between these three supercomputers. The tutorials also will include a session on how to write a successful NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) proposal.

NSF Director Katerina Antypas, Office of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)/Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), will kick off 5NRP March 20 with a joint 5NRP and KNIT 8 keynote presentation followed by a Q&A session. Antypas oversees the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot. It’s a multi-agency, multi-year program that provides a growing set of compute, data and educational resources for AI-related research projects, including the recently announced initial call for proposals. NAIRR is broadly supported across more than one dozen government agencies, as well as partners from industry and NGOs.

“We constructed the 5NRP agenda to highlight both application and implementation presentations on long-term NRP growth as well as short-term onboarding techniques for easy access to extensive NRP resources,” said Gwen Jacobs, 5NRP program chair together with Larry Smarr.

According to Susan Rathbun and Tom DeFanti, planning chairs for 5NRP, the workshop “will feature talks about implementing and using massive AI computing with shared data capabilities by researchers and educators at all levels, addressing the major goals and opportunities of NAIRR.”

For registration and other workshop details, please visit the 5NRP website. Please register early  because 5NRP and FABRIC KNIT 8 each plan to cap registration at 100, with more stringent restrictions for the tutorials on March 19. AI researchers and those who support them, network and system administrators, campus CIOs, regional network leaders, The Quilt R&E network members, and representatives of ESnet, Internet2, ACCESS, the Open Science Grid (OSG), the Open Storage Network (OSN), various NSF IRNC awardees, and the Global Research Platform’s international participants are encouraged to attend.