Barbara Hallock

Methods For Creating XSEDE Compatible Clusters

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment has created a suite of software that is collectively known as the basic XSEDE-compatible cluster build. It has been distributed as a Rocks roll for some time. It is now available as individual RPM packages, so that it can be downloaded and installed in portions as appropriate on existing and working clusters. In this paper, we explain the concept of the XSEDE-compatible cluster and explain how to install individual components as RPMs through use of Puppet and the XSEDE compatible cluster YUM repository.

XSEDE Campus Bridging Pilot Case Study

The major goals of the XSEDE Campus Bridging pilot were to simplify the transition between resources local to the researcher and those at the national scale, as well as those resources intermediary to them; to put in place software and other resources that facilitate diverse researcher workflows; and to begin resolving programming and usability issues with the software selected for these purposes. In this paper, we situate the pilot within the domain of existing research cyberinfrastructure (and in the context of campus bridging) and examine the process by which the pilot program was completed and evaluated. We then present a status update for the selected software packages and explore further advancements to be made in this realm.

Rockhopper, a true HPC system built with cloud concepts

A number of services for scientific computing based on cloud resources have recently drawn significant attention in both research and infrastructure provider communities. Most cloud resources currently available lack true high performance characteristics, such as high-speed interconnects or storage. Researchers studying cloud systems have pointed out that many cloud services do not provide service level agreements that may meet the needs of the research community. Furthermore, the lack of location information provided to the user and the shared nature of the systems use may create risk for users of the system, in the instance that their data is moved to an unknown location with an unknown level of security. Indiana University and Penguin Computing have partnered to create a system, Rockhopper, which addresses many of these issues. This system is a true high performance resource, with on-demand allocations, control, and tracking of jobs, situated at Indiana Universitys high-security datacenter facility. Rockhopper allows researchers to flexibly conduct their work under a number of use cases while also serving as an extension of cyberinfrastructure that scales from the researchers local environment all the way up through large national resources. We describe the architecture and ideas behind the creation of the system, present a use case for campus bridging, and provide a typical example of system usage. In a comparison of Rockhopper to a cloud-based system, we run the Trinity RNA-seq software against a number of datasets on both the Rockhopper system and on Amazons EC2 service.