It has been awhile since our last update. We are pleased to announce that there will be a major feature update to our current HPC environment, which we believe will bring significant improvement for all the HPC users. Hereby, we would like to invite all of you to join our feature integration pilot testing starting next week until the end of January.
This integration will bring a new web-based dashboard (Open OnDemand) to all the HPC users which allow all users to perform various HPC usage within the web browser (see attached for a preview of the front page). Some of the stuffs that users could not do or difficult to perform in the current HPC environment, but become possible in the latest dashboard update are:
- Launching a desktop environment within an HPC environment with a single button.
- Query and monitor job resources usage with organized graphs and metrics.
- Submit and manage jobs within the web browser.
- File management with web browser.
- Obtain a report of all the past jobs in a single page.
The things mentioned above are just parts of the new features that are going to be introduced in the upcoming dashboard update. We believe for new users that are unfamiliar with the HPC environment, this will significantly reduce the complexity and learning curve before they could start working with their calculation in the HPC environment. For expert users, they should now be able to know more about their jobs, and perhaps find a much more comfortable way to deal with their daily HPC usage.
Please keep in mind that this integration is still a work in progress, so users might encounter some bugs or problems when using it. But nonetheless, we are always here at the service desk to help resolve those issues. We will be organizing a short session on Introduction to HPC Open OnDemand Dashboard in Google Meet on 13 December 2021, 2pm. The calendar invitation will be sent out soon, and please do a RSVP so that it will be easier for us to manage the attendance.
We hope to gather as much information and feedback as possible during this pilot testing in order to improve it further and fix some potential bugs. Thank you for your participation in the pilot testing. If you have any problems or questions, do not hesitate to let us know.