SC22 Proceedings

The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis

Birds of a Feather Archive

Open OnDemand User Group Meeting


Authors: Alan Chalker (Ohio Supercomputer Center), David Hudak (Ohio Supercomputer Center), Robert Settlage (Virginia Tech), Robert Deleon (University of Buffalo)

Abstract: This BoF is meant to be an open discussion to guide the future roadmap for Open OnDemand (openondemand.org), by getting feedback from the community on the prioritization of the various tasks planned for the next few years. OOD is extremely relevant to ongoing discussions within the HPC community about user interfaces and science gateways. The session leaders, all part of the OOD development team, will jointly develop the content for the presentation in advance to ensure a wide range of viewpoints and topics are presented. We will also consult with our user advisory group in advance for their suggestions.

Long Description: Goals: The goal of this BoF is to provide a forum for the Open OnDemand (OOD) community to exchange experiences and best practices, as well as to engage with the project development team.

Topic Overview: Open OnDemand (openondemand.org) is an NSF-funded open-source HPC platform currently in use at over 200 HPC centers around the world. It is an intuitive, innovative, and interactive interface to remote computing resources. OOD helps computational researchers and students efficiently utilize remote computing resources by making them easy to access from any device. It helps computer center staff support a wide range of clients by simplifying the user interface and experience. Key OOD features include: - Plugin-free web experience - Easy file management - Command-line shell access - Job management and monitoring - Graphical desktop environments and applications.

Relevance to the Expected Audience: OOD is currently installed and running at hundreds of academic, governmental, and commercial HPC centers both in the US and internationally, including the University of Utah, Stanford, Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, Tufts University, University at Buffalo, University of Arizona, Texas A&M, and NorTech, and is actively being evaluated by dozens more. Most of these centers send representatives to the SC series of conferences.

A key differentiator of this year’s BOF compared to previous years is that the Open OnDemand project is formally included in the recently announced NSF ACCESS awards, which is the follow on to the NSF XSEDE program that is ending later in 2022. Open OnDemand will become the standard interface across all NSF ACCESS resources as a result, which is of significant interest to a large portion of the SC’22 attendees.

We have held multiple well-attended webinars and BoFs at conferences regarding Open OnDemand, which further demonstrate the interest to the HPC community. Below is a table of recent webinars / BoFs and attendance numbers:

Event Attendees PEARC’19 BoF 64 SC’19 BoF 75 PEARC’20 BoF 82 PEARC’21 BoF 90 Oct’21 OOD Tips and Tricks Webinar 102 Gateways’21 Working Session 32 Nov’21 OOD Tips and Tricks Webinar 71 SC’21 BoF 50 Dec’21 OOD Tips and Tricks Webinar 56 Jan’22 OOD Tips and Tricks Webinar 51 Feb’22 OOD Tips and Tricks Webinar 60 Mar’22 OOD Tips and Tricks Webinar 56 Mini Gateways’22 Open Forum 32

In addition, general interest in OOD at previous SCs has been demonstrated by the fact there have been several tutorials, papers, and posters that significantly include Open OnDemand in their content, many of which were authored by people that are not part of the core project team. We expect the same at SC’22 based upon submissions we are aware of.

Expected Outcomes: Key outcomes include a summary of the comments and discussion points, which include reports on installation and utilization issues from locations that currently have it installed, as well as a list of feature requests and development prioritizations. The initial slides presenting an OOD overview, roadmap summary and items of note are also always posted on our website for review by the community.


URL: http://openondemand.org/


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