# Presentation: 185685

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

- Christian Engelmann
**Network and Cluster Computing Group**
**Computer Science and Mathematics Division**
**Oak Ridge National Laboratory**

## Existing Scientific ApplicationDevelopment and Deployment Issues

- Existing Scientific ApplicationDevelopment 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**

## 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

**Virtualized command 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**
**Virtualized command 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**

## Virtualized Command Toolkit

**Unifying abstraction over heterogeneous HPC resources**
**Command line****and GUI tools**
**Translation into fine-tuned invocations of native toolkits**
**Behavior encapsulated in (vendor-provided) modules**
**Configurable by system administrators**
**Tunable by end-users**

## Next-Generation Runtime Environment

**Uniform interface to various front-end systems**
**Virtualized baseline platform runtime environment capabilities**
**Advanced runtime environment capabilities via high-level plugins**

## Virtual Environments

**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**

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

## Contacts

- Christian Engelmann
- Network and Cluster Computing Group
- Computer Science and Mathematics Division
- (865) 576-5491
- englemannc@ornl.gov
- Al Geist
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- (865) 574-31534
- gst@ornl.gov
- Jack Dongarra
- University of Tennessee
- (865) 974-8295
- Vaidy Sunderam
- Emory University
- (404) 727-5926

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