VC3 - Virtual Clusters at PEARC 2018

The VC3 project (virtualclusters.org) allows end users to dynamically create virtual clusters with custom software and middleware, running on top of existing national computing facilities.  Using only standard login access to computing facilities, you can deploy a computing environment specialized for a complex application, and share it with your collaborators.

Today, Prof Thain is presenting the VC3 project at the PEARC 2018 conference, on behalf of the entire VC3 team:

• Lincoln Bryant and Jeremy Van and Benedikt Riedel and Robert Gardner and Jose Caballero and John Hover and Ben Tovar and Douglas Thain,
  VC3: A Virtual Cluster Service for Community Computation 
  PEARC: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing, pages 1-8, 2018. DOI:10.1145/3219104.3219125

Check out the service online at virtualclusters.org:

We are currently recruiting new users for beta testing, please sign up here:

http://bit.ly/vc3-signup

Reproducibility in Scientific Computing

"Reproducibility in Scientific Computing", an article by (recent grad) Peter Ivie recently appeared in the journal ACM Computing Surveys.  This article gives a high level overview of the technical challenges inherent in making scientific computations reproducible, along with a survey of approaches to attacking these problems. Check it out!

Halfway Through 2018 Summer REU

We are a little more than halfway through the 2018 edition of our summer Data Intensive Scientific Computing REU program at the University of Notre Dame.  This summer, our students are working on projects in network science, genome analysis, workflow systems, data visualization, and more.  At this point in the summer, students are finalizing their results and starting to work on posters and videos to present what they have learned for our summer research symposium.

Announcement: CCTools 7.0.0 released

The Cooperative Computing Lab is pleased to announce the release of version 7.0.0 of the Cooperative Computing Tools including Parrot, Chirp, JX, Makeflow, WorkQueue, Umbrella, Prune, SAND, All-Pairs, Weaver, and other software.

The software may be downloaded here:
http://ccl.cse.nd.edu/software/download

This is a major release which adds several features and bug fixes. Among them:

• [General] Catalog updates compressed, and via TCP. (Douglas Thain, Nick Hazekamp, Ben Tovar)
• [JX] Bug fixes to JX, a superset of JSON to dynamically describe workflows, see doc/jx-tutorial.html. (Tim Shaffer, Douglas Thain)
• [Makeflow] Formally define and implement hooks to workflow rules. Hooks may be used to wrap rules with containers (e.g. singularity), a monitoring tool, etc.  (Nick Hazekamp, Tim Shaffer)
• [Makeflow] Rule execution as Amazon Lambda functions and S3 objects. (Kyle Sweeney, Douglas Thain)
• [Makeflow] Efficient shared file system access. (Nick Hazekamp)
• [Makeflow] Several bug fixes for rules executing in Mesos. (Chao Zheng)
• [ResourceMonitor] Several bug fixes. (Ben Tovar)
• [WorkQueue] Add user-defined features to workers and tasks. (Nate Kremer-Herman)
• [WorkQueue] Fixes for python3 support. (Ben Tovar)

Thanks goes to the contributors for many features, bug fixes, and tests:

• Nathaniel Kremer-Herman
• Nicholas Hazekamp
• Tim Shaffer
• Douglas Thain
• Ben Tovar
• Kyle Sweeney
• Chao Zheng

Please send any feedback to the CCTools discussion mailing list:

http://ccl.cse.nd.edu/community/forum

Enjoy!