Automating Account Management on an Academic HPC System with Authentication Federation

Abstract

There is increasing demand for High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster systems because more and more computational resources are necessary to carry out large-scale simulations and machine learning which are a crucial part of research and business today. There are two choices of HPC cluster systems: academic HPC cluster systems and public cloud services. Academic HPC cluster systems can be used with reasonable usage fees, although they take a long time until the cluster system is ready to use, because of its user registration procedure. On the other hand, public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, can be used immediately, but the utilization fees are expensive compared with those for academic systems. To fill the gaps between them, we propose an academic HPC cluster system with automated user registration that allows users to utilize the HPC cluster on demand.