Spruce: A System for Supporting Urgent High-Performance Computing

摘要

Modeling and simulation using high-performance computing are playing an increasingly important role in decision making and prediction. For time-critical emergency decision support applications, such as influenza modeling and severe weather prediction, late results may be useless. A specialized infrastructure is needed to provide computational resources quickly. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of SPRUCE, a system for supporting urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and distributed computing Grids. Currently deployed on the TeraGrid, SPRUCE provides users with "right-of-way tokens" that can be activated from a Web-based portal or Web service invocation in the event of an urgent computing need. Tokens are trans-ferrable and can be restricted to specific resource sets and priority levels. Once a session is activated, job submissions may request elevated priority. Based on local policy, computing resources can respond, for example, by preempting active jobs or raising the job's priority in the queue. This paper also explores the strengths and weaknesses of the SPRUCE architecture and token-based activation for urgent computing applications.