Crossroads Workflows

Abstract

The Department of Energy (DOE) compute facilities operate as resources for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Office of Science. In this document we describe a subset of scientific work flows which are run on current platforms. There is significant commonality to how Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), Lawrence Liver- more National Laboratory (LLNL) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) operate and conduct scienti c inquiry with supercomputers. In addition to presenting the commonality between the sites, we believe that opportunities exist to significantly optimize the operation of our facilities and more rapidly advance our scientific goals. In describing how our scientific work flows move from inception to realization we believe that we can enable significant improvements in how computer architectures support real scientific work flows. Briefly, in order for a team of scientists to access the large supercomputers at these facilities, the team must be granted an allocation. Allocations last for a fixed amount of time (usually 6 or 12 months), and a large number of teams will have overlapping allocations ensuring that a large amount of work is available in the scheduling queue. During the allocation, the scientists will construct work flows as described in this document. Many simultaneous allocations may use identical work flows with different data and scientific goals.