TemPSS: A service providing software parameter templates and profiles for scientific HPC

J. Cohen, C. Cantwell, D. Moxey, J. Nowell, P. Austing, X. Guo, J. Darlington, S. J. Sherwin

IEEE eScience (Munich, Germany) (2015)

@inproceedings{cohen-2015a,
  title = {{TemPSS: A service providing software parameter templates and profiles for scientific HPC}},
  author = {Cohen, J. and Cantwell, C. and Moxey, D. and Nowell, J. and Austing, P. and Guo, X. and Darlington, J. and Sherwin, S. J.},
  booktitle = {IEEE eScience (Munich, Germany)},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.1109/eScience.2015.43},
  url = {https://davidmoxey.uk/assets/pubs/2015-tempss.pdf},
  abstract = {Generating and managing input data for large-scale scientific computations has, for many classes of application, always been a challenging process.  The emergence of new hardware platforms and increasingly complex scientific models compounds this problem as configuration data can change depending on the underlying hardware and properties of the computation.  In this paper we present TemPro, a web based service for building and managing application input files in a semantically focused manner using the concepts of software parameter templates and job profiles.  Many complex, distributed applications require the expertise of more than one individual to allow an application to run efficiently on different types of hardware. TemPro supports collaborative development of application inputs through the ability to save, edit and extend job profiles that define the inputs to an application. We describe the concepts of templates and profiles and the structures that developers provide to add an application template to the TemPro service. In addition, we detail the implementation of the service and its functionality.}
}

Preparing the input for a large scientific code is difficult, and the right configuration often depends on the hardware it will run on and on the properties of the computation. This paper presents a web-based service for building and managing those inputs as parameter templates and job profiles, which can be saved, edited and extended so that the several people whose expertise a run depends on can each contribute to it.