Birds of a Feather

Open OnDemand User Group Meeting

Authors: Alan Chalker (Ohio Supercomputer Center), David Hudak (Ohio Supercomputer Center), Robert Deleon (University of Buffalo), Julie Ma (Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC))

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: This BoF will provide a forum for the Open OnDemand (OOD) community to exchange experiences, best practices, and engage with each other.

Topic Overview: Developed by the Ohio Supercomputer Center and funded by the National Science Foundation, Open OnDemand (openondemand.org) is an open-source portal that enables web-based access to HPC services. Clients can manage files and jobs, create and share apps, and run GUI applications.

OOD empowers students, researchers, and industry professionals with remote web access to supercomputers. From a client perspective, key features are that it requires zero installation (since it run entirely in a browser), is easy to use (via a simple interface), and is compatible with any device (even a mobile phone or tablet). From a system administrator perspective, key features are that it provides a low barrier to entry for users of all skill levels, is open source and has a large community behind it, and is configurable and flexible for user’s unique needs.

Relevance to the Expected Audience: OOD is now in use at nearly 500 research computing service providers across the world. These include public and private academic institutions, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and private industries. Notable installations include: (1) Fugaku at Riken in Japan (#2 on the Top500); (2) NSF ACCESS program systems including Purdue’s Anvil, PSC’s Bridges, NCSA’s Delta, and SDSC’s Expanse; (3) US Federal Reserve Banks in Kansas City and San Francisco; and (4) Children’s hospitals in Cincinnati and Seattle. All of the major commercial cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft , and Google) have pre-configured OOD instances available in their marketplaces. Most of these organizations send representatives to the SC conferences.

We have held well-attended user group BoFs in the past, which further demonstrate the interest to the HPC community, as seen in the below table. Typically, the audience includes existing community members as well as people new to OOD.

Event (Attendees) PEARC’19 (64) SC’19 (75) PEARC’20 (82) PEARC’21 (90) SC’21 (50) PEARC’22 (100) SC’22 (85) ISC’23 (87)

A differentiator from previous BoFs is the release in April 2023 of OOD 3.0. The last major release was over two years ago and this new version has many additional features that are of interest to the community, including support for remote files, help ticket integration, quick launch apps, and user profiles. Details of these will be included in the presentation.

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 OOD in their content, authored by people that are not part of the core project team. We expect the same at SC’23.

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.

Website: https://openondemand.org/