Collaborative Computing Support for Analysis Facilities Exploiting Software as Infrastructure Techniques

Abstract

Prior to the public release of Kubernetes it was difficult to conduct joint development of elaborate analysis facilities due to the highly non-homogeneous nature of hardware and network topology across compute facilities. However, since the advent of systems like Kubernetes and OpenShift, which provide declarative interfaces for building fault-tolerant and self-healing deployments of networked software, it is possible for multiple institutes to collaborate more effectively since resource details are abstracted away through various forms of hardware and software virtualization. In this whitepaper we will outline the development of two analysis facilities: "Coffea-casa" at University of Nebraska Lincoln and the "Elastic Analysis Facility" at Fermilab, and how utilizing platform abstraction has improved the development of common software for each of these facilities, and future development plans made possible by this methodology.

The Egyptian National HPC Grid (EN-HPCG): Open-Source Slurm Implementation from Cluster to Grid Approach

“…It incorporated dedicated re-sources allotted through FairShare using an HTCondor scheduler and was built on top of a local Kubernetes cluster. Another analysis facility prototype [43] was developed at Fermilab with the label "Elastic Analysis Facility." The analytic facility implementation presented in this study aimed to integrate the various geographic clusters at INFN with a novel scheduler-client connection system, following the same general direction as the prototypes just discussed.…”