Speaker
Description
During the last two years, the computational systems group at NERSC, in partnership with Cray, has been developing SMWFlow, a tool that makes managing system state as simple as switching branches in git. This solution is the cornerstone of collaborative systems management at NERSC and enables code-review, automated testing and reproducibility.
Besides supercomputers, NERSC hosts Mendel, a commodity meta-system containing multiple clusters, among them PDSF, used by the HEP community, and Denovo, used by the Joint Genome Institute, which uses a custom management stack built on top of xCAT and cfengine.
To merge efforts, provide a consistent user experience, and to leverage the work done on SMWFlow, we will talk about how we adapted the Cray imaging and provisioning system to work on a system on an architecture like Mendel and therefore reap the benefits of a modern systems management approach.
