Comet Virtual Cluster 'User' Experience

Presenter(s): Trevor Cooper (SDSC) Fugang Wang (IU)

Presentation Slides

Comet is an XSEDE HPC resource hosted and operated at SDSC and supported by systems staff at SDSC and user support staff at IU.

This demonstration explores the Virtual Cluster (VC) capability of Comet, a unique feature that provides projects with the ability to fully define their own software environment with a set of dynamically allocated virtual machines.

We will begin the demonstration with an overview on the design and architecture of the virtual cluster capability, and how it compares to other virtualized and cloud services. The high performance of the virtualized clusters combining the full AVX2 feature set of the Haswell processors and the InfiniBand HCAs using SR-IOV for MPI will be discussed.

We will then follow with a demonstration on how to build, configure, and manage virtual clusters using the Cloudmesh client, a tool to easily interface with multiple clouds from the command line and a command shell following a guide originally create for the XSEDE[16] hands-on tutorial. Time-permitting we will demonstrate multiple pre-configured virtual clusters and provide examples of possible administrative workflows available in this unique environment.

Finally we will provide references for further information on obtaining an allocation for Comet virtual clusters.

The Science Gateways Community Institute

Presenter(s): Nancy Wilkins-Diehr (SDSC)

Presentation Slides

Science gateways are a fundamental part of today's research landscape. Beginning in 2013, more users accessed XSEDE resources via gateways than they did from the command line. However, despite the presence of gateways for many years, development of these environments is often done with an ad hoc process, limiting success, resource efficiency, and long-term impact. Developers are often unaware that others have solved similar challenges before, and they do not know where to turn for advice or expertise. Without knowledge of what's possible, projects waste money and time implementing the most basic functions rather than the value-added features for their unique audience. Critically also many gateway efforts fail. Some fail early by not understanding how to build communities of users; others fail later by not developing plans for sustainability.

The Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI, http://www.sciencegateways.org) is one of the first implementation-phase software institutes to be awarded through NSF's Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program. SGCI has been designed as a service organization to address challenges by offering services to and building community among the research communities developing gateways. An application to be an XSEDE level two service provider is planned. The Institute's five-component design is the result of several years of studies, including many focus groups and a 5,000-person survey of the research community. This talk will describe SGCI's offerings and how they might benefit your work.