The ACROSS project aims at developing a modular, composable software stack that enables users to seamlessly run workflows over a very heterogeneous set of compute resources, which comprises HPC accelerated nodes and cloud resources. ACROSS focused on facilitating the description and run of workflows involving operations from different domains (HPC –e.g., numerical simulations, AI –e.g., inference with a surrogate model, HPDA, etc.) — we consider these as heterogeneous workflows. To this end, the stack has been designed to integrate components that allow to manage the various aspects of the execution in an efficient way. The project sees the access to different infrastructures (CINECA, IT4Innovations, EVIDEN experimental cluster –Nova); as such, the software stack has been thought to be modular and flexible in order to adapt to the characteristics of these infrastructures. When deployed on a given infrastructure, we refer to the ACROSS platform.
The validation of the proposed solution goes through the implementation of heterogeneous workflows belonging to 3 main application domains: aeronautics, weather and climate predictions, energy and carbon sequestration. These three domains are quite general to allow us covering a wide range of constraints; this said, we are looking for further additional workflows even belonging to different domains. Indeed, here is where stakeholders can try the ACROSS solutions and provide further inputs for future releases.
ACROSS software stack vs platform
One of the main outcomes of the project lays in the software stack, i.e., the set of software components and modules, properly architected in such a way the resulting system is flexible and modular. By being flexible and modular allows the software stack to adapt to very different infrastructures (which generally exhibits different kind of hardware, resource access policies, accounting, etc.). We refer to this stack as the ACROSS Software Stack. Whenever the stack is deployed on a given infrastructure, we call the combination of the two as the ACROSS Platform. At the moment of writing this questionnaire, compute resources are provided by CINECA, IT4Innovations and Eviden to the project partners. We would be delighted to see interest from other resource providers in the deployment of the ACROSS software stack.
See also: https://www.acrossproject.eu/across-platform/
Purpose of the questionnaire
The main purpose of this questionnaire is to collect a view (i.e., feedback, inputs, etc.) on the developed ACROSS software stack (and platform) from the outside of the project consortium. As such, the role of stakeholders is crucial to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed solution in order to better plan the actions for future releases. By having a clear vision on the way stakeholders perceive the software stack (and the platform), we can better plan the way to improve the solution over the future releases, as well as how to adapt it to better cover the needs of domains other than the three of the project.