Service Node Proxies

Ron Oldfield and Andy Wilson put together a paper to talk for the Cray User Group about how we're writing services that connect HPC applications to different information storage systems.

Abstract

Partitioning massively parallel supercomputers into service nodes running a full-fledged OS and compute nodes running a lightweight kernel has many well-known advantages but renders it difficult to access externally located resources such as high-performance databases that may only communicate via TCP. We describe an implementation of a proxy service that allows service nodes to act as a relay for SQL requests issued by processes running on the compute nodes. This implementation allows us to move toward using HPC systems for scalable informatics on large data sets that simply cannot be processed on smaller machines.

Publications

• CUG Paper Ron Oldfield, Andy Wilson, George Davidson, Craig Ulmer, and Todd Kordenbrock, "Access to External Resources Using Service-Node Proxies", Cray User Group

Presentations

• CUG Slides Slides that Ron presented at CUG