Lead: Charlie Clark
Our collaboration with PACE started with an initiative to generate open-source documentation for various different tools and technologies which could be used on PACE's high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. Our points of contact were Ron Rahaman and (later) Rachel Lombardi. The pinacle of this initiative was the publication of our first and, so far, only article with PACE, which can be found here. We had lined up some other articles, however it was difficult incentivizing the researchers to commit to continuously write and update them, and unfortunately they fell through. Luckily, our efforts seemed to cement our relationship with PACE, as we still maintain a good working relationship with them.
The failure of our previous approach boiled down to weak incentivization: given the historic distributions of final grades in our research courses, researchers have rarely needed any extra credit to do well, which they seemed to realize at some point. Thus, the future of this initiative may involve making the process easier for the researchers. My first thought on how to do this is to offer extra credit to the students in our new 8803 course (it will likely matter more there than in our research courses). It would simply be a matter of asking the researcher involved for a tutorial demonstration, asking as many questions as they need, and then writing and updating the article based on said tutorial.