SPRUCE: A System for Supporting Urgent High-Performance Computing

Abstract

Modeling and simulation using high-performance computing are playing an increasingly important role in decision making and prediction. For time-critical emergency decision support applications, such as influenza modeling and severe weather prediction, late results may be useless. A specialized infrastructure is needed to provide computational resources quickly. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of SPRUCE, a system for supporting urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and distributed computing Grids. Currently deployed on the TeraGrid, SPRUCE provides users with "right-of-way tokens" that can be activated from a Web-based portal or Web service invocation in the event of an urgent computing need. Tokens are transferrable and can be restricted to specific resource sets and priority levels. Once a session is activated, job submissions may request elevated priority. Based on local policy, computing resources can respond, for example, by preempting active jobs or raising the job's priority in the queue. This paper also explores the strengths and weaknesses of the SPRUCE architecture and token-based activation for urgent computing applications.

Injecting Dynamic Real-Time Data into a DDDAS for Forest Fire Behavior Prediction

“…For this reason, we are developing a a general DDDAS framework for any kind of simulator on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. In order to introduce the Urgent factor into the systems (Urgent-HPC) we will use SPRUCE (Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment) [2] as a authorization system for allocation urgent sessions. This approach will provide new challenges such as dynamic data injection in grid environments.…”

“…However, most of the current simulation tools are both off-line and sequential presenting slightly time restriction, such as most of the scientific applications. This work represents a step forward to make use of the available computing resources in order to drive this kind of applications to the dimension of the Urgent HPC applications [2].…”

Grid-Enabled Software Environment for Enhanced Dynamic Data-Driven Visualization and Navigation During Image-Guided Neurosurgery

“…The presented research utilized time-shared resources together with a large cluster operating in dedicated mode. However, we are currently investigating other opportunities, e.g., SPRUCE and urgent computing [9] on TeraGrid .…”

Dedicated IT infrastructure for Smart Levee Monitoring and Flood Decision Support

“…Notable efforts such as the SPRUCE [12] project focus on enhancement of scheduling algorithms in order to acknowledge the presence of urgent tasks and provision the necessary computational and storage infrastructure to support said tasks. In the Common Information Space (CIS) platform [13] provided by the UrbanFlood early warning system [14] cloud services are used for on-demand deployment and autoscaling of warning system instances in emergency situations.…”