SCEAPI: A unified Restful Web API for High-Performance Computing

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series 2017-10, Vol.898 (9), p.92022
• Main Authors: Rongqiang, Cao, Haili, Xiao, Shasha, Lu, Yining, Zhao, Xiaoning, Wang, Xuebin, Chi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Application programming interface; Applications programs; Cloud computing; Computational grids; High performance computing; Mobile computing; Physics; Web services
• ISSN: 1742-6588; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/898/9/092022

The development of scientific computing is increasingly moving to collaborative web and mobile applications. All these applications need high-quality programming interface for accessing heterogeneous computing resources consisting of clusters, grid computing or cloud computing. In this paper, we introduce our high-performance computing environment that integrates computing resources from 16 HPC centers across China. Then we present a bundle of web services called SCEAPI and describe how it can be used to access HPC resources with HTTP or HTTPs protocols. We discuss SCEAPI from several aspects including architecture, implementation and security, and address specific challenges in designing compatible interfaces and protecting sensitive data. We describe the functions of SCEAPI including authentication, file transfer and job management for creating, submitting and monitoring, and how to use SCEAPI in an easy-to-use way. Finally, we discuss how to exploit more HPC resources quickly for the ATLAS experiment by implementing the custom ARC compute element based on SCEAPI, and our work shows that SCEAPI is an easy-to-use and effective solution to extend opportunistic HPC resources.