The new InterActive Computing (IAC) service, in production on CINECA’s Galileo100 supercomputer, is now available to the NBFC community providing a completely new way of accessing supercomputing resources with a capacity of over 2 Pflops and over 20 PB of data storage.

The IAC service is provided by CINECA Consorzio Interuniversitario, the Italian National High-Performance Computing Center that has been supporting the research activities of the academic scientific community and offering computing services to universities in Italy and Europe for more than 50 years, partner of the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC).

IAC is an alternative approach to traditional access to HPC resources (i.e., via batch jobs) as it provides near-immediate access to computational nodes via a web browser interface.

The IAC service is part of the NBFC Digital Platform that aims to (a) reorganizing, digitizing, and harmonizing existing national datasets to make them accessible and useful to a broad audience, (b) providing biodiversity monitoring, conservation, and planning services to various types of users such as researchers and decision-makers, (c) hosting a model/tool catalogue and providing simplified access to complex datasets like the climate data hosted by Copernicus, and (d) supporting biodiversity monitoring and ecological integrity at a national scale with real-time monitoring (aiming for an early warning system) at a resolution of 2 km or higher. The NBFC Digital Platform bridges the gap between the needs of the NBFC scientific community and the availability of data models and computing power.

CINECA has been able to provide NBFC data scientists with a specific module, created for the HPC world, which allows them to optimize their activities in terms of simplicity, functionality and effectiveness, exploiting a mode of cloud access to CINECA’s HPC architecture.

The IAC service enables each user to create a working environment that best suits their research needs, combining data analysis tools, visualisation, workflow creation, and other functions implemented in the new interactive computing service. Once logged in with the two-factor authentication system, in order to increase the level of security, resources will be accessible almost immediately, eliminating the waiting time usually required to start an interactive processing session.

The interface provides web-based access to computing resources while introducing Jupyter technology into the HPC environment, which enables the creation of interactive notebooks and allows users to explore data, run simulations and display results in real-time. In addition, the new interactive environment integrates directly with the resource management system currently in production at CINECA (the SLURM scheduler), and enables efficient management of all requests sent to supercomputing environments. The services are designed to improve the user experience for both interactive and command-line users, prioritising usability and efficiency.

The NBFC digital platform includes four main thematic areas, namely:

1. Digitalisation of Natural History Collections,

2. Molecular biodiversity,

3. Biomolecules, biosources, bioactivity,

4. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function (BEF).

 

The four Thematic Areas, each addressing a fundamental dimension of biodiversity, have several components in common, and the outputs of one Thematic Area are often of use as inputs to the other Thematic Area. In the Figure below the architecture of the Platform is schematically described. The InterActive Computing area aims to support advanced users, to analyze data or create pipeline that can became available to the Platform’s users.

 

How to get access to IAC:

To get access to computational resources provided by the AIC project for the NBFC, the user must first register to the CINECA’s UserDB, filling in the form with the required information. After that, the user has to be associated with the project by the Principal Investigator (Prof. Andrea Galimberti, University of Milano-Bicocca, email: andrea.galimberti@unimib.it). It then takes 1-2 days for the system to process the registration. Finally, the user can go to the login page and use her/his credential to access computational resources.

For further information or help, please send an email to: nbfc.info@cineca.it.

Stay tuned as during the next weeks CINECA team will organise dedicated sessions to introduce NBFC researchers to the use of the IAC service!