Comparing the Consumption of CPU Hours with Scientific Output for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE)

This paper presents the results of a study that compares resource usage with publication output using data about the consumption of CPU cycles from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and resulting scientific publications for 2,691 institutions/teams. Specifically, the datasets comprise a total of 5,374,032,696 central processing unit (CPU) hours run in XSEDE during July 1, 2011 to August 18, 2015 and 2,882 publications that cite the XSEDE resource. Three types of studies were conducted: a geospatial analysis of XSEDE providers and consumers, co-authorship network analysis of XSEDE publications, and bi-modal network analysis of how XSEDE resources are used by different research fields. Resulting visualizations show that a diverse set of consumers make use of XSEDE resources, that users of XSEDE publish together frequently, and that the users of XSEDE with the highest resource usage tend to be “traditional” high-performance computing (HPC) community members from astronomy, atmospheric science, physics, chemistry, and biology.