Extending XSEDE Innovations to Campus Cyberinfrastructure - The XSEDE National Integration Toolkit

Volume 10, Issue 1 (January 2019), pp. 16–20

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@article{jocse-10-1-3,
  author={Eric Coulter and Jodie Sprouse and Resa Reynolds and Richard Knepper},
  title={Extending XSEDE Innovations to Campus Cyberinfrastructure - The XSEDE National Integration Toolkit},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2019,
  month=jan,
  volume=10,
  issue=1,
  pages={16--20},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/10/1/3}
}

XSEDE Service Providers (SPs) and resources have the benefit of years of testing and implementation, tuning and configuration, and the development of specific tools to help users and systems make the best use of these resources. Cyberinfrastructure professionals at the campus level are often charged with building computer resources which are compared to these national-level resources. While organizations and companies exist that guide cyberinfrastructure configuration choices down certain paths, there is no easy way to distribute the long-term knowledge of the XSEDE project to campus CI professionals. The XSEDE Cyberinfrastructure Resource Integration team has created a variety of toolkits to enable easy knowledge and best-practice transfer from XESDE SPs to campus CI professionals. The XSEDE National Integration Toolkit (XNIT) provides the software used on most XSEDE systems in an effort to propagate the best practices and knowledge of XSEDE resources. XNIT includes basic tools and configuration that make it simpler for a campus cluster to have the same software set and many of the advantages and XSEDE SP resource affords. In this paper, we will detail the steps taken to build such a library of software and discuss the challenges involved in disseminating awareness of toolkits among cyberinfrastructure professionals. We will also describe our experiences in updating the XNIT to be compatible with the OpenHPC project, which forms the basis of many new HPC systems, and appears situated to become the de-facto choice of management software provider for many HPC centers.