| Moab Workload Manager® |
A.20 Case Study: Ease of Use - Application Portals
Overview
A University must provide a broad set of applications to its faculty and student population to accomplish research and advance learning. Students and a portion of the faculty have a high turn over and therefore cause the organization to need to reduce learning curves and aid users to become productive quickly without having to learn the technical interactions of a HPC batch system to accomplish their work. The key applications used in differing organizations range from gene sequencing and physics modeling to design and video rendering.
Resources
The organization has almost a dozen clusters owned by different departments that are tied together with high speed internet, and managed primarily by a central organizations with a few exceptions. Operating systems vary between clusters as do resource managers, applications, architectures, speeds and other node and network attributes.Workload
The workload varies from very short jobs to large multi-week jobs. There is a large mix of variable workload priority, as well as a constantly changing mix of quantity of workload from any one organization as the academic focus switches each term.
Solution
Moab's Grid Suite allows the organization to unify a global view of the resources for planning purposes as well as establish some shared rules for the entire system, while maintaining sovereign rules for departments that seek to guide the use of the resources they purchased. Moab is able to dynamically adjust to the changing workload and apply optimization intelligence effectively in this highly complex environment.
Moab Access Portal becomes a centralized method for submission of general batch workload and reduces training costs and lost time due to accelerated productivity. It is applied across multiple resource manager environments to eliminate learning multiple tools, while still allowing resource manager commands to be applied to it so that existing learning is not lost. Further, Cluster Resources is able to work with the University to identify the most commonly used applications to create application-specific portal submission pages. These pages allow students and faculty to directly interact with the application to get their work done, and then using Moab Access Portal's APIs automate the submission steps so that the student or faculty member does not need to learn any job submission steps or interaction with the cluster or grid middleware tools. After the application interaction is complete, the resulting information is automatically formed into an appropriate script and submitted without further requirements from the end user. This significantly reduces training time and allows a student's academic experience to remain focused in the area of expertise without deviating to learn the technical aspects of HPC on the way.
More advanced sites request integration between the application, Moab and identity management services or databases to allow for role-based access to applications and information sources that have privileged or sensitive information. This can be used to allow important commercial services to be extended to end-users without revealing all information provided to those with established trust, or can simplify the interaction for users that do not need the added options.
Even more advanced sites integrate application portals with multi-step production or operational processes to streamline business activities. These integrated elements may include provisioning managers, databases, CRM, ERP and other business applications as well as other batch centric applications. The result is a closed loop process that directly applies the information based research and transactions to result in the needed actions and associated tracking practices. The results also commonly consist of multiple automated contingency processes to ensure that nothing is dropped and service levels are optimized.