skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: GenApp, Containers and Abaco: Technical Paper
GenApp is an NSF-funded framework for rapid generation of applications including feature rich science gateways. GenApp is being successfully used to produce science gateways wrapping scientific programs. Its organization is designed to simplify the process of adding new features and capabilities to generated applications. A limited set of definition files define application generation. To bring a new executable into GenApp, one creates a single "module" definition file. The executable must run on some compute resource accessible by the generated application. Installations of the executable on target resources may be complex. To simplify portability of execution, we introduce automatic containerization of defined modules and integration of container execution. Abaco is an NSF-funded web service and distributed computing platform providing functions-as-a-service (FaaS) to the research computing community. Abaco implements functions using the Actor Model of concurrent computation. We introduce GenApp integration of execution with Abaco as a resource.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1912444 1740097 1265817
PAR ID:
10116251
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing on Rise of the Machines (learning) - PEARC '19
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 8
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ACCESS is a program established and funded by the National Sci- ence Foundation to help researchers and educators use the NSF na- tional advanced computing systems and services. Here we present an analysis of the usage of ACCESS allocated cyberinfrastructure over the first 16 months of the ACCESS program, September 2022 through December 2023. For historical context, we include analyses of ACCESS and XSEDE, its NSF funded predecessor, for the ten-year period from January 2014 through December 2023. The analyses in- clude batch compute resource usage, cloud resource usage, science gateways, allocations, and users. 
    more » « less
  2. The goal of a robust cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem is to catalyse discovery and innovation. Tapis does this through offering a sustainable production-quality set of API services to support modern science and engineering research, which increasingly span geographically distributed data centers, instruments, experimental facilities, and a network of national and regional CI. Leveraging frameworks, such as Tapis, enables researchers to accomplish computational and data-intensive research in a secure, scalable, and reproducible way and allows them to focus on their research instead of the technology needed to accomplish it. This project aims to enable the integration of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and CloudyCluster resources into Tapis- supported science gateways to provide on-demand scaling needed by computational workflows. The new functionality uses Tapis event-driven Abaco Actors and CloudyCluster to create an elastic distributed cloud computing system on demand. This integration allows researchers and science gateways to augment cloud resources on top of existing local and national computing resources. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    We describe the design motivation, architecture, deployment, and early operations of Expanse, a 5 Petaflop, heterogenous HPC system that entered production as an NSF-funded resource in December 2020 and will be operated on behalf of the national community for five years. Expanse will serve a broad range of computational science and engineering through a combination of standard batch-oriented services, and by extending the system to the broader CI ecosystem through science gateways, public cloud integration, support for high throughput computing, and composable systems. Expanse was procured, deployed, and put into production entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic, adhering to stringent public health guidelines throughout. Nevertheless, the planned production date of October 1, 2020 slipped by only two months, thanks to thorough planning, a dedicated team of technical and administrative experts, collaborative vendor partnerships, and a commitment to getting an important national computing resource to the community at a time of great need. 
    more » « less
  4. Summary The explosion of IoT devices and sensors in recent years has led to a demand for efficiently storing, processing and analyzing time‐series data. Geoscience researchers use time‐series data stores such as Hydroserver, Virtual Observatory and Ecological Informatics System (VOEIS), and Cloud‐Hosted Real‐time Data Service (CHORDS). Many of these tools require a great deal of infrastructure to deploy and expertise to manage and scale. The Tapis framework, an NSF funded project, provides science as a service APIs to allow researchers to achieve faster scientific results, by eliminating the need to set up a complex infrastructure stack. The University of Hawai'i (UH) and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have collaborated to develop an open source Tapis Streams API that builds on the concepts of the CHORDS time series data service to support research. This new hosted service allows storing, processing, annotating, archiving, and querying time‐series data in the Tapis multi‐user and multi‐tenant collaborative platform. The Streams API provides a hosted production level middleware service that enables new data‐driven event workflows capabilities that may be leveraged by researchers and Tapis powered science gateways for handling spatially indexed time‐series datasets. 
    more » « less
  5. Reed, Daniel A.; Lifka, David; Swanson, David; Amaro, Rommie; Wilkins-Diehr, Nancy (Ed.)
    This report summarizes the discussions from a workshop convened at NSF on May 30-31, 2018 in Alexandria, VA. The overarching objective of the workshop was to rethink the nature and composition of the NSF-supported computational ecosystem given changing application requirements and resources and technology landscapes. The workshop included roughly 50 participants, drawn from high-performance computing (HPC) centers, campus computing facilities, cloud service providers (academic and commercial), and distributed resource providers. Participants spanned both large research institutions and smaller universities. Organized by Daniel Reed (University of Utah, chair), David Lifka (Cornell University), David Swanson (University of Nebraska), Rommie Amaro (UCSD), and Nancy Wilkins-Diehr (UCSD/SDSC), the workshop was motivated by the following observations. First, there have been dramatic changes in the number and nature of applications using NSF-funded resources, as well as their resource needs. As a result, there are new demands on the type (e.g., data centric) and location (e.g., close to the data or the users) of the resources as well as new usage modes (e.g., on-demand and elastic). Second, there have been dramatic changes in the landscape of technologies, resources, and delivery mechanisms, spanning large scientific instruments, ubiquitous sensors, and cloud services, among others. 
    more » « less