Building a Scalable Infrastructure
Ravi P. N. Tripathi, William Stonewall Monroe, Mike Hanby, John‐Paul Robinson · Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing · 2020
This paper documents our experience in building a scalable cyberinfrastructure to grow computational research and enhance collaboration across the research enterprise. It describes a modernized research computing system built on the principles of Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) and DevOps. This approach helps develop, test and deploy enhancements to our High Performance Computing (HPC) platform. By separating development from production, the approach offers opportunities to train developers new to distributed systems and HPC platforms, safely gaining advanced skills in demand but not common in today’s job market. Providing a deployment pipeline empowers teams with varying skill levels to effectively contribute enhancements to HPC platforms extending the capacity of operations professionals. The paper highlights our experience in setting up a web frontend for HPC resources in the form of Open OnDemand. The Open OnDemand web interface new users transition from their dedicated workstations to the HPC ecosystem.