Supercomputing with MPI meets the Common Workflow Language standards: an experience report

Abstract

Use of standards-based workflows is still somewhat unusual by high-performance computing users. In this paper we describe the experience of using the Common Workflow Language (CWL) standards to describe the execution, in parallel, of MPI-parallelised applications. In particular, we motivate and describe the simple extension to the specification which was required, as well as our implementation of this within the CWL reference runner. We discuss some of the unexpected benefits, such as simple use of HPC-oriented performance measurement tools, and CWL software requirements interfacing with HPC module systems. We close with a request for comment from the community on how these features could be adopted within versions of the CWL standards.

Utilising urgent computing to tackle the spread of mosquito-borne diseases

“…Illustration of the interactions of VESTEC marshalling and control system stack involved in job submission on an HPC machine including bioinformatics. Consequently all workloads to be actually executed on the HPC machine are described in CWL and it is this workflow description that is submitted to the batch queue system, with CWL then deciding which applications to execute and when [10].…”