NSF Award Simplifies Access to Supercomputing

The University of California, Los Angeles will lead a three-year national initiative to create a unified environment for research computing, data, and scientific applications across several National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported national computing centers and two cloud platforms. The effort is supported by a $9 million NSF award.

The project will create a browser-based interface called the Interactive Discovery Laboratory (iDLab) that makes accessing and using high-performance computing, data storage, and scientific applications as easy as visiting a webpage. The platform will complement today's command-line interface requirements with an intuitive web-based experience.

Designed to support interactive, iterative research at national scale, iDLab will enable researchers, educators, and students to discover, access, and use advanced computing and data resources through a single environment.

Research progresses interactively. Ideas are formed and tested through rapid iteration on data. These workflows are becoming more data-intensive and more computationally demanding. iDLab will serve as a front door, providing interactive access to the computing and research data capabilities of participating national computing centers.

“Research progresses interactively,” said Amit Chourasia, principal investigator of the iDLab project and chief research data architect in UCLA’s Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC). “Ideas are formed and tested through rapid iteration on data. These workflows are becoming more data-intensive and more computationally demanding. iDLab will serve as a front door, providing interactive access to the computing and research data capabilities of participating national computing centers.”

Building on a platform developed and piloted at UCLA called OneSciencePlace, iDLab brings together computing, data, and scientific applications in a unified environment that simplifies access to national cyberinfrastructure.

“Researchers should be able to focus on their science rather than on the complexity of the underlying technology,” said Davida Johnson, executive director of OARC. “iDLab extends our mission to make advanced research computing more accessible by providing an intuitive environment that connects computing, data, and expertise across national computing centers.”

iDLab will integrate resources across five university computing centers: the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin; the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University; and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, operated jointly by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. The platform will also integrate two cloud providers to be selected.

TACC's Tapis, TMS Power Secure Research Workflows Across HPC Centers

As a project partner, TACC's role extends beyond providing computing resources.

The center is developing the software infrastructure that powers workflow automation and orchestration across participating sites and beyond through its Tapis platform. Tapis provides powerful programmable interfaces that have supported science gateways and research computing platforms for years, but iDLab represents a significant evolution by enabling researchers to execute workflows across multiple HPC facilities rather than within a single environment.

Supporting this multi-site approach requires new capabilities for securely managing identity, access, and trust across institutions. To address this challenge, TACC has developed the Trust Management System (TMS), a software platform that works alongside Tapis to federate and delegate access to user accounts across participating HPC centers. TMS provides the trust framework researchers need to securely access distributed resources while allowing institutions to maintain control over their local systems.

With iDLab, we are building the software foundation that allows those resources to work together securely. TAPIS provides workflow automation and orchestration, and our new Trust Management System enables the identity and access management essential for multi-site collaboration.

Although TMS has been operating successfully at TACC for two years in a single-site configuration, expanding it to support multiple HPC centers requires new development. iDLab funding will support enhancing, configuring, and deploying Tapis and TMS across partner sites. Together, Tapis and TMS form the technical foundation that enables OneSciencePlace to deliver secure, automated, and interoperable research workflows on a national scale.

"Researchers increasingly need to combine data and computing resources that reside at different institutions, but today's systems weren't designed to make that seamless,” said Joe Stubbs, a co-principal investigator on the project and research scientist in TACC's Advanced Computing Interfaces group.

“With iDLab, we are building the software foundation that allows those resources to work together securely. TAPIS provides workflow automation and orchestration, and our new Trust Management System enables the identity and access management essential for multi-site collaboration. Together, these technologies will make it much easier for researchers to focus on their science instead of the complexity of moving between computing environments."

Long-Term Vision: A Single Connected System

PI Chourasia said the project's long-term vision is to make the nation's research cyberinfrastructure function as a single, connected ecosystem.

“By integrating computing, research data, and scientific applications, iDLab will enable researchers and educators to pursue discovery, collaborate more effectively, train the workforce, and adopt emerging technologies and infrastructure.”