Virtualizing the Stampede2 Supercomputer with Applications to HPC in the Cloud

Methods developed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are described and demonstrated for automating the construction of an elastic, virtual cluster emulating the Stampede2 high performance computing (HPC) system. The cluster can be built and/or scaled in a matter of minutes on the Jetstream self-service cloud system and shares many properties of the original Stampede2, including: i) common identity management, ii) access to the same file systems, iii) equivalent software application stack and module system, iv) similar job scheduling interface via Slurm. We measure time-to-solution for a number of common scientific applications on our virtual cluster against equivalent runs on Stampede2 and develop an application profile where performance is similar or otherwise acceptable. For such applications, the virtual cluster provides an effective form of "cloud bursting" with the potential to significantly improve overall turnaround time, particularly when Stampede2 is experiencing long queue wait times. In addition, the virtual cluster can be used for test and debug without directly impacting Stampede2. We conclude with a discussion of how science gateways can leverage the TACC Jobs API web service to incorporate this cloud bursting technique transparently to the end user.Comment: 6 pages, 0 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US

Ticket to Talk: Supporting Conversation between Young People and People with Dementia through Digital Media

We explore the role of digital media in supporting intergenerational interactions between people with dementia and young people. Though meaningful social interaction is integral to quality of life in dementia, initiating conversation with a person with dementia can be challenging, especially for younger people who may lack knowledge of someone’s life history. This can be further compounded without a nuanced understanding of the nature of dementia, along with an unfamiliarity in leading and maintaining conversation. We designed a mobile application - Ticket to Talk - to support intergenerational interactions by encouraging young people to collect media relevant to individuals with dementia to use in conversations with people with dementia. We evaluated Ticket to Talk through trials with two families, a care home, and groups of older people. We highlight difficulties in using technologies such as this as a conversational tool, the value of digital media in supporting intergenerational interactions, and the potential to positively shape people with dementia’s agency in social settings

Reproducible and Portable Workflows for Scientific Computing and HPC in the Cloud

The increasing availability of cloud computing services for science has changed the way scientific code can be developed, deployed, and run. Many modern scientific workflows are capable of running on cloud computing resources. Consequently, there is an increasing interest in the scientific computing community in methods, tools, and implementations that enable moving an application to the cloud and simplifying the process, and decreasing the time to meaningful scientific results. In this paper, we have applied the concepts of containerization for portability and multi-cloud automated deployment with industry-standard tools to three scientific workflows. We show how our implementations provide reduced complexity to portability of both the applications themselves, and their deployment across private and public clouds. Each application has been packaged in a Docker container with its dependencies and necessary environment setup for production runs. Terraform and Ansible have been used to automate the provisioning of compute resources and the deployment of each scientific application in a Multi-VM cluster. Each application has been deployed on the AWS and Aristotle Cloud Federation platforms. Variation in data management constraints, Multi-VM MPI communication, and embarrassingly parallel instance deployments were all explored and reported on. We thus present a sample of scientific workflows that can be simplified using the tools and our proposed implementation to deploy and run in a variety of cloud environments.Comment: Accepted for publication in the ACM conference proceedings for Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC '20