High-End Application Execution Middleware

HPC-as-a-Service is a well known term in the area of high performance computing. It enables users to access an HPC infrastructure without a need to buy and manage their own physical servers or data center infrastructure. Through this service small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can take advantage of the technology without an upfront investment in the hardware. This approach further lowers the entry barrier for users and SMEs who are interested in utilizing massive parallel computers but often do not have the necessary level of expertise in this area.

To provide this simple and intuitive access to the supercomputing infrastructure an in-house application framework called HEAppE has been developed. This framework is utilizing a mid-layer principle, in software terminology also known as middleware. Middleware manages and provides information about submitted and running jobs and their data between the client application and the HPC infrastructure. HEAppE is able to submit required computation or simulation on HPC infrastructure, monitor the progress and notify the user should the need arise. It provides necessary functions for job management, monitoring and reporting, user authentication and authorization, file transfer, encryption, and various notification mechanisms.

Please see the official HEAppE documentation at https://heappe.eu/docs.

HEAppE Middleware has already been successfully used in a number of public and commercial projects:

• in H2020 project LEXIS as a part of LEXIS Platform to provide the platform's job orchestrator access to a number of HPC systems in several HPC centers; https://lexis-project.eu
• in crisis decision support system Floreon+ for What-If analysis workflow utilizing HPC clusters; https://floreon.eu
• in ESA's BLENDED project - Synergetic use of Blockchain and Deep Learning for Space Data to enable the execution of Blockchain-based computation and access to the IPFS data network
• in ESA's Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (Urban-TEP) as a middleware enabling sandbox execution of user-defined docker images on the cluster; https://urban-tep.eo.esa.int
• in H2020 project ExCaPE as a part of Drug Discovery Platform enabling execution of drug discovery scientific pipelines on a supercomputer; http://excape-h2020.eu
• in the area of molecular diagnostics and personalized medicine in the scope of the Moldimed project as a part of the Massive Parallel Sequencing Platform for analysis of NGS data; https://www.imtm.cz/moldimed
• in the area of bioimageinformatics as a integral part of FIJI plugin providing unified access to HPC clusters for image data processing; http://fiji.sc

HEAppE Middleware is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. For suport contact us via support.heappe@it4i.cz.

This work was supported by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports from the National Programme of Sustainability (NPS II) project ”IT4Innovations excellence in science - LQ1602” and by the IT4Innovations infrastructure which is supported from the Large Infrastructures for Research, Experimental Development and Innovations project ”IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center – LM2015070”.