34 research outputs found
Deploying Jupyter Notebooks at scale on XSEDE resources for Science Gateways and workshops
Jupyter Notebooks have become a mainstream tool for interactive computing in
every field of science. Jupyter Notebooks are suitable as companion
applications for Science Gateways, providing more flexibility and
post-processing capability to the users. Moreover they are often used in
training events and workshops to provide immediate access to a pre-configured
interactive computing environment. The Jupyter team released the JupyterHub web
application to provide a platform where multiple users can login and access a
Jupyter Notebook environment. When the number of users and memory requirements
are low, it is easy to setup JupyterHub on a single server. However, setup
becomes more complicated when we need to serve Jupyter Notebooks at scale to
tens or hundreds of users. In this paper we will present three strategies for
deploying JupyterHub at scale on XSEDE resources. All options share the
deployment of JupyterHub on a Virtual Machine on XSEDE Jetstream. In the first
scenario, JupyterHub connects to a supercomputer and launches a single node job
on behalf of each user and proxies back the Notebook from the computing node
back to the user's browser. In the second scenario, implemented in the context
of a XSEDE consultation for the IRIS consortium for Seismology, we deploy
Docker in Swarm mode to coordinate many XSEDE Jetstream virtual machines to
provide Notebooks with persistent storage and quota. In the last scenario we
install the Kubernetes containers orchestration framework on Jetstream to
provide a fault-tolerant JupyterHub deployment with a distributed filesystem
and capability to scale to thousands of users. In the conclusion section we
provide a link to step-by-step tutorials complete with all the necessary
commands and configuration files to replicate these deployments.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced
Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US
From Bare Metal to Virtual: Lessons Learned when a Supercomputing Institute Deploys its First Cloud
As primary provider for research computing services at the University of
Minnesota, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) has long been
responsible for serving the needs of a user-base numbering in the thousands.
In recent years, MSI---like many other HPC centers---has observed a growing
need for self-service, on-demand, data-intensive research, as well as the
emergence of many new controlled-access datasets for research purposes. In
light of this, MSI constructed a new on-premise cloud service, named Stratus,
which is architected from the ground up to easily satisfy data-use agreements
and fill four gaps left by traditional HPC. The resulting OpenStack cloud,
constructed from HPC-specific compute nodes and backed by Ceph storage, is
designed to fully comply with controls set forth by the NIH Genomic Data
Sharing Policy.
Herein, we present twelve lessons learned during the ambitious sprint to take
Stratus from inception and into production in less than 18 months. Important,
and often overlooked, components of this timeline included the development of
new leadership roles, staff and user training, and user support documentation.
Along the way, the lessons learned extended well beyond the technical
challenges often associated with acquiring, configuring, and maintaining
large-scale systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, PEARC '18: Practice and Experience in Advanced
Research Computing, July 22--26, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, US
Collaborative Cloud Computing Framework for Health Data with Open Source Technologies
The proliferation of sensor technologies and advancements in data collection
methods have enabled the accumulation of very large amounts of data.
Increasingly, these datasets are considered for scientific research. However,
the design of the system architecture to achieve high performance in terms of
parallelization, query processing time, aggregation of heterogeneous data types
(e.g., time series, images, structured data, among others), and difficulty in
reproducing scientific research remain a major challenge. This is specifically
true for health sciences research, where the systems must be i) easy to use
with the flexibility to manipulate data at the most granular level, ii)
agnostic of programming language kernel, iii) scalable, and iv) compliant with
the HIPAA privacy law. In this paper, we review the existing literature for
such big data systems for scientific research in health sciences and identify
the gaps of the current system landscape. We propose a novel architecture for
software-hardware-data ecosystem using open source technologies such as Apache
Hadoop, Kubernetes and JupyterHub in a distributed environment. We also
evaluate the system using a large clinical data set of 69M patients.Comment: This paper is accepted in ACM-BCB 202
Targeted stem cells expressing TRAIL as a therapy for lung Cancer TACTICAL: a phase I/II trial
A survey and classification of software-defined storage systems
The exponential growth of digital information is imposing increasing scale and efficiency demands on modern storage infrastructures. As infrastructure complexity increases, so does the difficulty in ensuring quality of service, maintainability, and resource fairness, raising unprecedented performance, scalability, and programmability challenges. Software-Defined Storage (SDS) addresses these challenges by cleanly disentangling control and data flows, easing management, and improving control functionality of conventional storage systems. Despite its momentum in the research community, many aspects of the paradigm are still unclear, undefined, and unexplored, leading to misunderstandings that hamper the research and development of novel SDS technologies. In this article, we present an in-depth study of SDS systems, providing a thorough description and categorization of each plane of functionality. Further, we propose a taxonomy and classification of existing SDS solutions according to different criteria. Finally, we provide key insights about the paradigm and discuss potential future research directions for the field.This work was financed by the Portuguese funding agency FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia through national funds, the PhD grant SFRH/BD/146059/2019, the project ThreatAdapt (FCT-FNR/0002/2018), the LASIGE Research Unit (UIDB/00408/2020), and cofunded by the FEDER, where applicable
Abstract
In petabyte-scale distributed file systems that decouple read and write from metadata operations, behavior of the metadata server cluster will be critical to overall system performance. We examine aspects of the workload that make it difficult to distribute effectively, and present a few potential strategies to demonstrate the issues involved. Finally, we describe the advantages of intelligent metadata management and a simulation environment we have developed to validate design possibilities.
Abstract
In petabyte-scale distributed file systems that decouple read and write from metadata operations, behavior of the metadata server cluster will be critical to overall system performance and scalability. We present a dynamic subtree partitioning and adaptive metadata management system designed to efficiently manage hierarchical metadata workloads that evolve over time. We examine the relative merits of our approach in the context of traditional workload partitioning strategies, and demonstrate the performance, scalability and adaptability advantages in a simulation environment.