Web Portals for High-performance Computing

Abstract

This article addresses web interfaces for High-performance Computing (HPC) simulation software. First, it presents a brief history, starting in the 1990s with Java applets, of web interfaces used for accessing and making best possible use of remote HPC resources. It introduces HPC web-based portal use cases. Then it identifies and discusses the key features, among functional and non-functional requirements, that characterize such portals. A brief state of the art is then presented. The design and development of Bull extreme factory Computing Studio v3 (XCS3) is chosen as a common thread for showing how the identified key features can all be implemented in one software: multi-tenancy, multi-scheduler compatibility, complete control through an HTTP RESTful API, customizable user interface with Responsive Web Design, HPC application template framework, remote visualization, and access through the Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting security framework with the Role-Based Access Control permission model. Non-functional requirements (security, usability, performance, reliability) are discussed, and the article concludes by giving perspective for future work. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Graphical user interfaces; • Information systems → RESTful web services; • Computing methodologies → Massively parallel and high-performance simulations; • Software and its engineering → Cloud computing;

Enabling High‐Performance Cloud Computing for Earth Science Modeling on Over a Thousand Cores: Application to the GEOS‐Chem Atmospheric Chemistry Model

“…Building a multinode HPC cluster environment on the clouds used to be difficult, prompting developments of “HPC‐as‐a‐Service” (Baun et al, 2011; Church et al, 2015; Huang, 2014; Section 2.3 of Netto et al, 2017; Wong & Goscinski, 2013), where scientists can access a preconfigured HPC environment, often through a graphical web portal (Calegari et al, 2019), with no need to understand the underlying infrastructure. However, such black‐box service has several drawbacks for research computing: (1) The available software libraries and applications are determined by the HPC service provider and are not easy to extend to custom research code and (2) continuous maintenance by the service provider is required to keep software and hardware up to date.…”

Enabling high-performance cloud computing for Earth science modeling on over a thousand cores: application to the GEOS-Chem atmospheric chemistry model

“…Building a multi-node HPC cluster environment on the clouds used to be difficult, prompting developments of "HPC-as-a-Service" (Baun et al, 2011;Wong and Goscinski, 2013;Huang, 2014;Church et al, 2015;Section 2.3 of Netto et al, 2017), where scientists can access a preconfigured HPC environment, often through a graphical web portal (Calegari et al, 2019), with no need to understand the underlying infrastructure. However, such black-box service has several drawbacks for research computing: (1) the available software libraries and applications are determined by the HPC service provider, and are not easy to extend to custom research code; (2) continuous maintenance by the service provider is required to keep software and hardware up-todate.…”

A component-based framework for certification of components in a cloud of HPC services

“…MapReduce is the parallel processing model of a number of large-scale parallel processing frameworks [10]. A user must specify: a map function, which is applied by a set of parallel mapper processes to each element of an input list of key/value pairs (KV-pair 2 ) and returns a set of elements in an intermediary list of KV-pairs; and a reduce function, which is applied by a set of parallel reducer processes to each element of an intermediate list of key/multi-value pairs (KMV-pair 3 ), and yield a list of output KV-pairs. Fig.…”

“…By means of SAFe, application providers build applications, through which domain specialists access the services of HPC Shelf. Applications are domainspecific problem-solving environments, such as web portals [2]. They provide a high-level interface through which specialists specify problems.…”

“…Combined with the inherent complexity of parallel system design, this fact implies the need for effective mechanisms to ensure that, in parallel computing systems, components and interactions between them behave as expected by application providers and predicted by component developers. In software engineering, this is a problem known as certification of software components [3][4][5][6][7]. In the context of HPC Shelf, the certification problem can be seen from two perspectives.…”