HPC-as-a-Service via HEAppE Platform

The HPC-as-a-Service concept is to provide users with simple and intuitive access to a supercomputing infrastructure without the need to buy and manage their own physical servers or data centers. This article presents the commonly used services and implementations of this concept and introduces our own in-house application framework called High-End Application Execution Middleware (HEAppE Middleware). HEAppE’s universally designed software architecture enables unified access to different HPC systems through simple object-oriented web-based APIs, thus providing HPC capabilities to users without the necessity to manage the running jobs forms the command-line interface of the HPC scheduler directly on the cluster. This article also contains the list of several pilot use-cases from a number of thematic domains where the HEAppE Platform was successfully used. Two of those pilots, focusing on satellite image analysis and bioimage informatics, are presented in more detail.