03-20, 11:30–11:40 (US/Eastern), Belfer Case Study Room (CGIS S020)
This session discusses using CILogon and Open OnDemand to enable institution-specific authentication and branding for Swarthmore College's and Lafayette College's merged HPC cluster.
Swarthmore College and Lafayette College completed the initial merger of their HPC systems in summer 2024. A requirement of this project was that users from both institutions should feel like "first-class citizens." We did not want to require, for example, a user from Lafayette to have Swarthmore guest account in order to access the cluster, or for a Swarthmore user to see a Lafayette domain and associated branding when using the system. Open OnDemand's flexible architecture allowed us to configure CILogon as the authentication gateway, thus allowing users to login using their home credentials, while also providing configuration profiles to customize the experience for each institution. This is an elegant solution that can facilitate an arbitrary number of institutions sharing infrastructure and services under a single, unified Open OnDemand instance while maintaining specific branding and resources for each.
Jason Simms is the Research Computing Manager at Swarthmore College. Prior to that, he had a similar role at Lafayette College for several years and also worked in academic computing at Wesleyan University. He is a member of the Campus Champions leadership team and also is active within the ERN, CASC, CaRCC, and CyberAmbassador communities. He earned a Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology, an M.P.H. in Environmental Health, and a graduate certificate in Geographical Information Systems, all from the University of South Florida. He also earned an M.A. in Anthropology and a B.A. in Classics from the University of Tennessee. When not working in ITS, he teaches courses on ancient Classical and Near-Eastern Civilizations at Lafayette College.