03-20, 11:45–11:55 (US/Eastern), Tsai Auditorium (CGIS S010)
The Anvil supercomputer, funded by the NSF and maintained by Purdue University, powers research across the country. Anvil’s web dashboard is an Open OnDemand portal with just the base features, including creating jobs and viewing the job queue. However, a lot of information is locked behind Slurm terminal commands and other scripts, making it difficult for researchers without terminal knowledge to access the information provided by these commands. The goal of this project is to create a detailed, user-friendly dashboard built off of Open OnDemand to provide useful information about the cluster and their own jobs. This improved dashboard enables researchers to more efficiently conduct their research and access commonly-needed cluster information without learning complex terminal commands.
Open OnDemand contains many useful features for conducting research computing, including the Interactive Jobs and the Files apps, allowing any user of Purdue University’s NSF-funded Anvil supercomputer to start commonly-used applications and manage their files on Anvil without ever touching the terminal. However, the base Open OnDemand configuration lacks several other features that would be useful for Anvil users, especially users with no terminal knowledge. This results in many support tickets that can be addressed through information found in Slurm workload manager’s terminal commands and other relevant shell scripts on Anvil. This informational short talk discusses some of the new features being integrated into the Anvil web dashboard to help users perform detailed job accounting and access cluster status information from the Open OnDemand dashboard without any knowledge of the terminal. We hope to collect feedback from the Open OnDemand and HPC community about this ongoing project so we can improve Anvil’s web dashboard, providing useful, detailed job accounting and cluster information for users in a format that is easy to understand and navigate. The new features currently being developed and tested on Anvil include a homepage dashboard app containing information about each user’s own service unit usage, disk and file count usage and quota, important announcements, queue statuses, and queued jobs. Another new feature is the My Jobs app, which we created as an overhaul and improvement of Open OnDemand’s Active Jobs app to provide more detailed, user-friendly job accounting information, including key statistics about each job from Slurm accounting database, improved job filtering, and charts displaying distributions of job data. In addition, the Performance Metrics app provides information about the resource efficiency of users’ jobs, comparing their requested CPU cores, memory, and time with the amount they actually utilize. The goal of these three apps is to be as user-friendly and intuitive as possible while providing detailed information that users want to know regarding their jobs and the Anvil supercomputer. We want to share the features and improvements being worked on for Anvil’s Open OnDemand dashboard as well as generate feedback and discussion about further potential Open OnDemand improvements to eventually contribute these changes back to the Open OnDemand community.
Hello, I am an undergraduate student studying Computer Science at Purdue University. I currently work with the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing.