Open Grid Forum's HPC Basic Profile 1.0 Specification at SC08

The Open Grid Forum’s HPC Basic Profile specification will be shown in use in both commercial and research implementations at SC08. The HPC Basic Profile uses Web Services as an interface to expose different resource managers on different operating systems to enable users to submit, monitor and manage jobs on clusters located in different organisations. The HPC Basic Profile is a standard (published as GFD 114 ) that references existing specifications including:

• OGF Job Submission Description Language (JSDL)
  
• OGF Basic Execution Service (BES)
  
• WS-I Basic Profile
  

In order to run the application, a user requests that a job be run through the resource manager - represented by a compliant HPC Basic Profile web service endpoint. Each application is described using JSDL, an XML-based language for describing the job to be run, while the OGF BES web services defines an interface that allows web services clients to submit, monitor and control jobs through the local resource manager. The HPC Basic Profile defines how the JSDL and BES specifications are composed with components of the WS-Security specification to achieve interoperability.

The HPC Basic Profile leverages standard Web services protocols and development environments. It allows application and middleware software providers to target multiple HPC systems via a single protocol. The demonstration clearly shows how organizations can benefit by

• Integrating commercial and open source products into existing and new HPC systems
  
• Interfacing with HPC systems at remote locations
  
• Leveraging generic HPC utilities
  

Implementations of the HPC Basic Profile are being demonstrated at booths throughout the conference. Many of these implementations are available as open source software, are engineering protypes of upcoming products or releaed products. A common theme of all the implementations are to submit jobs from one administrative domain to a cluster residing in a different domain. The demonstration includes the submission of tasks from a client in one booth to a resource manager running in another booth, the retrieval of a task’s execution status and the retrieval of information about an HPC system’s resources.

Demonstrations at SC08