Build and Execution Environment (BEE): An Encapsulated Environment Enabling HPC Applications Running Everywhere

Abstract

Variations in High Performance Computing (HPC) system software configurations mean that applications are typically configured and built for specific HPC environments. Building applications can require a significant investment of time and effort for application users and requires application users to have additional technical knowledge. Linux container technologies such as Docker and Charliecloud bring great benefits to the application development, build and deployment processes. While cloud platforms already widely support containers, HPC systems still have non-uniform support of container technologies. In this work, we propose a unified runtime framework - Build and Execution Environment (BEE) across both HPC and cloud platforms that allows users to run their containerized HPC applications across all supported platforms without modification. We design four BEE backends for four different classes of HPC or cloud platform so that together they cover the majority of mainstream computing platforms for HPC users. Evaluations show that BEE provides an easy-to-use unified user interface, execution environment, and comparable performance.

Meeting Name

2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2018 (2018: Dec. 10-13, Seattle, WA)

Department(s)

Computer Science

Comments

This work was funded by the US Government contract DE-AC52-06NA25396 for Los Alamos National Laboratory, operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, for the US Department of Energy. This work was also supported by NSF Award No. 1513201.

Keywords and Phrases

Cloud Computing; Container; High Performance Computing

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-153865035-6

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2019 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

22 Jan 2019

Share

 
COinS