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. 2022 Jun;15(6):197-207.
doi: 10.4236/jsea.2022.156011. Epub 2022 Jun 29.

API Development Increases Access to Shared Computing Resources at Boston University

George Jones  1 , Amanda E Wakefield  2   3 , Jeff Triplett  4 , Kojo Idrissa  4 , James Goebel  5 , Dima Kozakov  1 , Sandor Vajda  2   3
Affiliations

API Development Increases Access to Shared Computing Resources at Boston University

George Jones et al. J Softw Eng Appl. 2022 Jun.

Abstract

Within the last few decades, increases in computational resources have contributed enormously to the progress of science and engineering (S & E). To continue making rapid advancements, the S & E community must be able to access computing resources. One way to provide such resources is through High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers. Many academic research institutions offer their own HPC Centers but struggle to make the computing resources easily accessible and user-friendly. Here we present SHABU, a RESTful Web API framework that enables S & E communities to access resources from Boston University's Shared Computing Center (SCC). The SHABU requirements are derived from the use cases described in this work.

Keywords: API Framework; High-Performance Computing; Open Source; Science and Engineering; Software Architecture.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Information flow generated by the user.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Workflow of user interactions. All users interact with the API (blue) to run commands based on API input (light blue). These commands generate tasks to run using celery (green) which interacts with the SCC (yellow), specifically the jobs directory and the SGE.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Looking up a job with the swagger UI documentation for the “/apis/jobs//” endpoint. The Swagger UI provides a webpage for users to explore the API interactively.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Result of looking up a job using the swagger UI. The results were obtained after querying the “/apis/jobs//” API endpoint. The response body section shows the JSON response received from the API, and the response headers section shows the HTTP headers from the received request.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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