Seamlessly Managing HPC Workloads Through Kubernetes

Abstract

[EN] This paper describes an approach to integrate the jobs management of High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures in cloud architectures by managing HPC workloads seamlessly from the cloud job scheduler. The paper presents hpc-connector, an open source tool that is designed for managing the full life cycle of jobs in the HPC infrastructure from the cloud job scheduler interacting with the workload manager of the HPC system. The key point is that, thanks to running hpc-connector in the cloud infrastructure, it is possible to reflect in the cloud infrastructure, the execution of a job running in the HPC infrastructure managed by hpc-connector. If the user cancels the cloud-job, as hpc-connector catches Operating System (OS) signals (for example, SIGINT), it will cancel the job in the HPC infrastructure too. Furthermore, it can retrieve logs if requested. Therefore, by using hpc-connector, the cloud job scheduler can manage the jobs in the HPC infrastructure without requiring any special privilege, as it does not need changes on the Job scheduler. Finally, we perform an experiment training a neural network for automated segmentation of Neuroblastoma tumours in the Prometheus supercomputer using hpc-connector as a batch job from a Kubernetes infrastructure.