HPC Basic Profile Web Service

Do you want to access the HPCS 2008 Job Scheduler from other environments such as Java, Linux, etc? Or build Job Submission tools around a standard web services based interface?

Well, in the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP) released this week we have included a new feature – the HPC Basic Profile Web Service or the HPCBP for short – that can help you do just that! This is a web service, built using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) that provides access to some of HPCS 2008’s core job submission functionality. Through the HPCBP you are able to submit a job, discover a job’s status, discover a job’s properties, terminate a job, and find out information about the cluster that you are running on.

The primary motivation for this feature came from other groups in the HPC community who wanted a standard interface that allowed jobs to be passed between HPC resources. Over the last few years, using an open process within the Open Grid Forum (OGF), developers from industry and research from both the open source and commercial software communities, have come to agreement on the web service interface and protocols that can provide greatest interoperability. These set of specifications are encapsulated within the HPC Basic Profile 1.0.

More information relating to the HPCBP specification and its implementation and deployment within HPCS 2008 can be found here.