About allocations

Allocations is where you can gain access to many of the most powerful computing, storage, and related cyberinfrastructure resources available to the U.S. research community. These resources provide essential capabilities for advancing science and education across all fields of science. The Allocations team develops and operates the Resource Allocations Marketplace and Platform Services (RAMPS) within the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program.

• The RAMPS allocation environment offers a welcoming gateway that inspires collaboration and participation in the pursuit of scientific discovery while continuing to provide an essential gatekeeping function when necessary to balance demand for resources with the available supply.
• The RAMPS marketplace is toppling many current allocations approaches by removing barriers between researchers and their needed resources, RAMPS creates an open, inviting, and democratized marketplace.
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the allocations environment is a central focus of the project. RAMPS is working to ensure the full participation of women, persons with disabilities, and underserved populations in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
• RAMPS provides an efficient, scalable and simplified interface for researchers, educators, and students to request resources in support of their research, educational, and workforce development endeavors. The RAMPS software platform is built with an emphasis on modularity, extensibility, and decentralization and is flexible enough to accommodate allocations for current and future computational and non-computational resources and services.
• For the resource providers in the ecosystem, RAMPS streamlines the process of integrating new systems and services.
• ACCESS Credits, a universal allocation currency, and standardized allocation tiers allow RAMPS to accelerate allocation request and review.
• Through a suite of Innovative Pilots, RAMPS is introducing disruptive features to the ecosystem and allocations marketplace to: inform current and future enhancements, decentralize the entry points for ACCESS allocations by building a set of campus and regional On-RAMPS, integrate cloud resources, define computational workflows as allocable resources, and enhance the allocations infrastructure to serve sensor nets and instrumentation.

The RAMPS project is executed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) / Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) (the Awardee) with subcontractors the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) / National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).