Project Scope

Purpose

The propose of the project is to:

  • Develop infrastructure to support the development, debugging, deployment, monitoring, and analyzing of HPC applications from the desktop to the capability machines
  • Provide investment in true innovation rather than duplication of effort

The ultimate project outcome will be a technical specification and a reference implementation.

Nature

The nature of the project will be:

  • Open source, but supportive of proprietary extensions/implementations
  • Long lived
  • Cross platform
  • Multi-vendor

The project will provide formal processes to ensure consistency, quality, interoperability and extensibility.

Key Architectural Goals

The following were identified as key architectural goals for the project. They are ranked as follows:

  • High (H) - Essential for the initial implementation
  • Medium (M) - Important, and will be available in future releases
  • Low (L) - Useful, and will be available if time permits
  1. Scalability
    • Application size (H)
    • Startup costs (H)
    • Impact on machine/application (H)
  2. Portability
    • Support for different types of O/S and architectures (H)
    • Identifying platform specific/ platform independent components (H)
    • Multiple programming language bindings (H)
    • Portable reference implementation e.g. language, configuration, build system, etc. (H)
  3. Extensibility
    • Easily support experimental development (H)
    • Extendibility framework (H)
  4. Interoperability
    • Multiple agents (H)
    • Stackable agents (M)
  5. Security model (H)
  6. Focus on a single administrative domain (H)
  7. Fault tolerant (tool, network, node, etc.) (M)
  8. Pluggable topology (H)
  9. Infrastructure and agent execution life cycle (H)
  10. Multi-lingual support (L)
  11. Query for capabilities (H)
  12. Agent/service discovery (M)
  13. Heterogeneous systems (H)
  14. Agent neutral (H)
  15. Data management services (e.g files)(M)
  16. Asynchronous communication channel between the frontend and the agents, and between agents (H)
  17. Out of band communications (L)
  18. Thread safety (H)

The following were identified as key deliverables for the project:

  1. Frontend to infrastructure API
  2. Infrastructure to agent API
  3. Inter-agent communication API
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