# Presentation: 823443

## The Harness Workbench: Unified and Adaptive Access to Diverse HPC Platforms

- Christian Engelmann
**Computer Science Research Group**
**Computer Science and Mathematics Division**
**Oak Ridge National Laboratory**

## Existing scientific applicationdevelopment and deployment issues

**The diversity of HPC platforms and associated software complexity often pose challenges that lead to slow or hampered scientific discovery.**
**Application scientists expend considerable time and effort dealing with development, deployment, and runtime interfacing activities.**
**Additionally, the short HPC system deployment and upgrade interval requires frequent redeployment of scientific application to different system software stacks.**

- Existing scientific applicationdevelopment and deployment issues

## Research and development goals

**Increasing the overall productivity of developing and executing computational codes**
**Optimizing the development and deployment processes****of scientific applications**
**Simplifying the activities of application scientists, using uniform and adaptive solutions**
**“****Automagically” supporting the diversity of existing and emerging HPC architectures**

**Typical scientific application development, deployment, and execution activities**

## Harness workbench core components

**Harness Workbench Toolkit**
**Unified development, deployment, and execution**
**Common view across diverse HPC platforms**
**User-space installation and virtual environments**
**Next-generation runtime environment**
**Flexible, adaptive, lightweight framework**
**Management of runtime tasks**
**Support for diverse HPC platforms**

## Harness workbench core technologies

**Automatic adaptation using pluggable modules**
**Harness Workbench Toolkit plug-ins**
**Runtime environment plug-ins**
**Development environment and toolkit interfaces**
**Easy-to-use interfaces for scientific application development, deployment, and execution**

## Common view across diverse platforms

**Various interfaces and bindings to external development and deployment tools ****and environments**
**Generalized model****for unified access ****to common development and deployment activities**
**Mapping of generalized activities onto platform-specific toolkits and runtime environments (RTEs) via pluggable modules**

## Harness Workbench Toolkit

**Unifying abstraction over heterogeneous HPC resources**
**Command line and GUI tools**
**Translation into ****fine-tuned ****invocations of ****native toolkits**
**Behavior ****encapsulated ****in plug-ins**
**Configurable ****through profiles**
**Tunable by ****end users**

## Next-generation runtime environment

**Virtualized baseline platform runtime environment capabilities**
**Advanced runtime environment capabilities via high-level plug-ins**

## Virtualized environments

**Virtualized adaptation of system properties to actual application needs**
**System and runtime environment virtualization**

**Problem:**
**Application dependencies may cause conflicts with system-wide installed libraries.**
**Solution:**
**Use co-existing, alternative user-space installations.**
**Approach:**
**Provide isolated installation environments (“sandboxes”).**
**These can inherit from one another to build nested   hierarchies.**

## Configurable “sandboxes” for scientific applications

**Scientific**
**application**

**Virtualized environment**
**XML configuration description**

## The Harness workbench: Unified and adaptive access to diverse HPC platforms

**Virtualized adaptation of system properties to actual application needs**
**System and runtime environment virtualization**

## Contacts

- Christian Engelmann
- Computer Science Research Group
- Computer Science and Mathematics Division
- (865) 574-3132
- engelmannc@ornl.gov
- Al Geist
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- (865) 574-3153
- gst@ornl.gov
- Jack Dongarra
- University of Tennessee
- (865) 974-8295
- Vaidy Sunderam
- Emory University
- (404) 727-5926

-    Englemann_Harness_SC07