NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center

WNA RESOURCE ADVISORY PANEL (WRAP)

Overview. The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) is built upon a partnership between the University of Wyoming (UW) and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), called the UW-NCAR Alliance (WNA). The Project Governance Board (PGB) oversees the WNA and the associated activities. Through the WNA, Wyoming-based researchers and their collaborators have access to computing resources equivalent to twenty percent of the resources supported by NCAR’s NSF base-funding.

Article 3.1 of the WNA agreement, establishes a committee, henceforth called the Wyoming–NCAR Resource Advisory Panel (WRAP), charged with the responsibility for evaluating allocation proposals on their overall merit and appropriateness for the NWSC resources.  Co-chairs of the committee are appointed by the UW President and the NCAR Director and are charged with developing and implementing this Charter for the WRAP that describes the policies and procedures under which the WRAP will operate, including issues of conflict of interest.

WRAP Membership. The WRAP is co-chaired by one representative from the University of Wyoming and one representative from NCAR.  The co-chairs serve 3 year terms; the first NCAR co-chair will serve 2 years, and the first Wyoming co-chair will serve 3 years.

The WRAP shall consist of 4-6 panel members, each appointed to three-year terms by the WRAP co-chairs. 

WRAP members shall be highly regarded researchers, administrators or support personnel, who are experts in the use of high-performance computing (HPC) to enable scientific inquiry. The NSF’s program coordinator for the NCAR and Facilities Section will be invited to attend panel meetings as an observer.  At the conclusion of each WRAP meeting, the co-chairs will prepare a summary of the WRAP's findings and recommendations in a letter to the PGB. The PGB will then communicate its final recommendations to CISL.

WRAP Meetings. The WRAP meets twice per year, at least one of these meetings will be face-to-face.  

WRAP Responsibilities. The responsibilities of the WRAP committee are to:

1. Conduct regular meetings to assess the merit of large requests for allocations of the WNA resources and to make a recommendation with respect to each request on the basis of computational experimental design, computational effectiveness, availability of resources and broader impacts.

2. Amend, as necessary from time to time, criteria that requests must meet to be eligible for consideration for an award of the WNA resources. 

3. Select the projects, based on established criteria, for which the WNA will recommend an allocation of the NWSC resources. 

4. Specify the processes under which proposals will be prepared and solicited from the researchers for use of the WNA resources. 

Conflicts of interest. WRAP organization, policies, and procedures shall be designed to assure fair and equitable treatment to all resource requesters, and to protect the integrity of the research, the science, and all parties (in particular the researchers, the WRAP committee members, UCAR, and UW) involved. The NCAR co-chair shall remove his/herself from any discussions for proposals related to his/her NCAR lab, and the UW co-chair shall do the same for proposals related to his/her department.

A co-chair may elect to take appropriate steps to remove him/herself from discussions of other proposals for which the perception of COI is significant. 

A detailed Conflict of Interest policy can be found at COI.