Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh)

推进吞吐量计算伙伴关系(PATH)项目将通过创新、转换工作和大规模采用来扩展分布式高吞吐量计算(DHTC)技术和方法，以推进更广泛社区的科学与工程目标。该项目将为科学家和管理员提供管理计算工作负载和资源的改进方法-通过高吞吐量计算(HTC)原则将原始容量转换为有效容量，从而最大限度地将分布式计算资源的持续使用用于处理计算问题。Path的分布式HTC方法将努力提高全国计算资源的投资回报，使机构能够共享计算能力，同时最大限度地提高利用率，同时也让较小的校园更容易获得这一重要能力。PATH先进的技术服务于国家利益，促进了从学术研究小组到大型合作、机构和行业的科学进步，并设计和执行了培训和推广部分，以增强能够从这些服务中受益的社区的能力。PATH与美国国家科学基金会国家CI协调服务蓝图的目标一致，即创建一个“一个敏捷、集成、稳健、值得信赖和可持续的CI生态系统，在科学和工程(S&E)研究和教育的所有领域推动新的思维和变革性的发现。”PATH汇集了两个在支持dHTC研究方面有很强历史经验的实体：高吞吐量计算中心(CHTC)和开放科学网格(OSG)联盟。20世纪90年代中期，在威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校创立CHTC的团队率先提出了HTC的概念和原则，并从那时起一直在推动和维持HTCS。大致同时，在物理研究人员需求的推动下，多样化和多学科的合作在20世纪90年代末奠定了OSG的基础，以开发、部署、运营和维护跨越地理和行政边界的共享和全球dHTC生态系统。PATH使这两个合作伙伴能够协调努力，利用彼此的优势，在一个项目的屋檐下进行协调。Path将开发容量服务结构(FOCAS)，以构建垂直dHTC能力，并推动HTCondor软件套件(HTCS)的下一阶段创新。HTCS提供了一系列丰富的工具，用于调度、联合计算和存储资源，并调配这些资源以支持本地、机构、国家和国际规模的高吞吐量工作负载。在PATH中，HTCS将获得将外部资源(特别是HPC机器上的分配)纳入科学工作负荷的新能力。除了HTCS在FOCAS生产服务中的核心作用外，Path的核心承诺将继续并通过将外部技术和想法整合到dHTC生态系统中来加强这些服务。在OSG Connect服务的成功基础上，以及CHTC在威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校开创的以校园为导向的研究计算促进方法的基础上，Path将在越来越多的校园(包括NSF CC*计划下的校园)培养当地的dHTC专业知识和能力。加强PATH的培训、推广和社区建设活动将进一步扩大dHTC影响力的影响范围。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) project will expand Distributed High Throughput Computing (dHTC) technologies and methodologies through innovation, translational effort, and large-scale adoption to advance the Science & Engineering goals of the broader community. The project will offer improved ways for scientists and administrators to manage computing workloads and resources – transforming raw capacity into effective capacity with High Throughput Computing (HTC) principles that maximize the sustained use of distributed computing resources toward computational problems. PATh’s distributed HTC approach will strive to increase the national return on investment of compute resources by enabling institutions to share computing capacity, simultaneously maximizing utilization while also giving smaller campuses easier access to this vital capacity. The techniques advanced by PATh serve the national interest by promoting the progress of science, from academic research groups, to large collaborations, institutions, and industry, with training and outreach components designed and executed to empower the communities that can benefit from these services. PATh is aligned with the NSF National CI Coordination Services blueprint’s goal of producing an “an agile, integrated, robust, trustworthy and sustainable CI ecosystem that drives new thinking and transformative discoveries in all areas of science and engineering (S&E) research and education.” PATh brings together two entities with a strong history of supporting dHTC-enabled research: the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) and the Open Science Grid (OSG) Consortium. The team that founded CHTC at University of Wisconsin–Madison pioneered, in the mid 1990s, the concept and principles of HTC and has advanced and sustained HTCSS ever since. Roughly in parallel and driven by the needs of physics researchers, a diverse and multidisciplinary collaboration laid the foundation of the OSG in the late 1990s to develop, deploy, operate, and sustain a shared and global dHTC ecosystem of sites spanning geographic and administrative boundaries. PATh enables these two partners to align their efforts and leverage each other’s respective strengths, coordinated under the roof of one project. PATh will develop a Fabric of Capacity Services (FoCaS) to build vertical dHTC capabilities and drive the next phase of innovation in the HTCondor Software suite (HTCSS). The HTCSS offers a rich collection of tools for scheduling, federating compute and storage resources, and provisioning these resources to support high-throughput workloads at local, institutional, national, and international scales. In PATh, the HTCSS will receive new capabilities for incorporating external resources (particularly, allocations on HPC machines) into scientific workloads. In addition to the central role of the HTCSS in FoCaS production services, PATh’s core commitment will continue and fortify these services by integrating external technologies and ideas into the dHTC ecosystem. Building on the success of the OSG Connect service, and on campus-oriented Research Computing Facilitation methodologies pioneered by the CHTC at UW-Madison, PATh will create local dHTC expertise and capabilities at a growing number of campuses, including those under the NSF CC* program. Enhanced training, outreach, and community-building activities in PATh will further diversify the reach of dHTC impacts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.