TemPSS is a web service for managing application parameter templates and profiles which are used for collaboratively generating input files for scientific HPC applications.
The service can be used as a standalone tool that offers a simplified user-focused environment for preparing application input files or it may be incorporated into more advanced tools for running scientific HPC applications via a web interface.
The tool forms an element of the libhpc framework that is being developed to provide a simplified environment for specifying and running HPC jobs on clusters and clouds.
Templates are structures that represent all the parameters that can be used to configure a particular piece of software or a component of a piece of software. These parameters are grouped and documented in a manner that is designed to make them easy for users to understand. Note that the parameters represented in a template may not map directly to individual parameters in an application's input file - they may be structured differently to aid users in defining their application configuration.
Profiles are instantiations of templates. A profile consists of values for some or all of a given template's parameters. The corresponding template contains validation data for each of its parameters. A profile that has valid values provided for all the required parameters in a template is classed as a valid profile and can be used to generate an input for for a job.
TemPSS is a Java Web Service. The service can be built using
Apache Maven and requires Java 7+. To build, clone
the repository, and run mvn package in the project base directory.
If the build completes successfully, output files will be generated in the
target directory.
The service is contained within target/tempss.war.
The service can be deployed in Apache Tomcat. Copy
the tempss.war to your ${CATALINA_HOME}/webapps/ directory to deploy
the service. If your Tomcat server is configured to run on port 8080, the
service will be accessible at http://localhost:8080/tempss.
Whilst it is strongly recommended to package the service as a .war archive for production use, the service can be also run locally by simply invoking the command mvn jetty:run-war in the project base directory. The
service again will be accessible at http://localhost:8080/tempss.
The interface at http://localhost:8080/tempss/component.jsp is an example of a simple interface to display template trees. The interface available at http://localhost:8080/tempss is an example of a more advance profile manager tool.
A Dockerfile is provided to support building a docker image that can be used to start a container running the TemPSS service. To build the image, clone the repository and change into the base repository directory, tempss, where the Dockerfile file is located. From here you can use docker's command line tool to build the image:
sudo docker build --rm=true -t <my tag> .
You should replace <my tag> with a tag that will be used to identify the image.
Assuming the image builds successfully, sudo docker images should show the new image listed.
You can now start a container based on this image. Network ports for the running services will be mapped to ports on the host system and these mappings are configured in the run command. ${HOST_IP} should be the IP of the interface on the host server that will receive requests to forward to the container. Currently the image is configured to run SSH on port 22 and Apache Tomcat on port 8080. To be able to SSH to the container, you will need to uncomment the line in the Dockerfile that creates an authorized_keys file and paste your public key into this line. The container is run as follows:
sudo docker run -t -d -p ${HOST_IP}:8080:8080 -p ${HOST_IP}:8022:22 --name="tempss" <my tag>
You can adjust the first port number in the -p switch values to change the port on your host system that will listen for requests and forward them to the docker container. You can SSH to the container from your host machine by specifying the port on localhost that you have selected as port to forward to SSH on the container, e.g.
ssh -i ~/.ssh/<private key file> -p 8022 root@${HOST_IP}
A configuration file tempss.conf can be used to provide static configuration information to the TemPSS service. This file is read once at startup. The file is an INI-style configuration file. The file can be placed in /etc/ or in the home directory of the user running the TemPSS service in the .libhpc directory, e.g. /home/myuser/.libhpc/tempss.conf. A configuration file placed in ~/.libhpc/tempss.conf takes precedence over a tempss.conf file placed in /etc.
The configuration file currently supports only one section [template-ignore] which is used for hiding the display of certain templates. In cases where an administrator does not want all the default TemPSS templates to appear as options in the user interface, template IDs can be added to the template-ignore section of the configuration file. Each entry should appear on a separate line and can be a full template ID, or a partial ID followed by a wildcard * character. Note that, at present, the wildcard character can only appear at the end of a string. For example, to hide all templates that have an id beginning with bio-, enter a line into the [tempss-ignore] section of tempss.conf containing bio-*.
Client-side JavaScript Library
The TemPSS team includes members from Department of Computing, Imperial College London and EPCC, University of Edinburgh. Current and former developers and contributors to the TemPSS project include:
- Peter Austing
- Chris Cantwell
- Jeremy Cohen
- David Moxey
- Jeremy Nowell
This tool is licensed under the BSD New (3-Clause) license. See the LICENSE
file in the source tree for full details.
TemPSS and the template/profile methodology have been developed as part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)-funded libhpc stage I (EP/I030239/1) and II (EP/K038788/1) projects which are a collaboration between Imperial College London and The University of Edinburgh.