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On-Demand Secure Cluster Computing

TRECC's Linux cluster is dedicated to entrepreneurial and small/medium enterprises who are performing computations or simulations as part of research initiatives funded by specific federal funding programs geared toward technology transfer.

The general practice in high-performance computing environments requires potential users of computing resources to reserve allocations of time for using the resource. On-demand secure cluster computing is intended to eliminate this requirement and to make it possible for customers to dynamically pay for the resources they use. William Yurcik (NCSA/UIUC) and Laximant Kale (Dept of Computer Science, University of Illinois) are currently developing a process which makes rapid, secure access to TRECC's Linux cluster available to customers.

On-demand secure cluster computing enables clients who have been vetted and authorized to use resources to simply sign on and begin work. It involves implementing an assignment algorithm that reviews the next job in the queue and assigns that job to select available processors using a first-in-the-queue prioritization scheme for authorized users.

Yurcik and Kale will be focusing on developing two resources: a cluster manager that accepts jobs for execution and a job scheduler that can shrink and expand jobs to a variable number of processors dynamically. They anticipate that their project will add a number of new capabilities to the TRECC Linux cluster, including:

  • A web-based user authentication and authorization system for on-demand security.
  • Efficient and transparent scheduling of processes on cluster resources to maximize on-demand available resources given executing processes, process priorities, and process reservations.
  • Extension of the mechanisms from one cluster to share resources between other parallel resources/clusters using a grid-wide area network infrastructure.