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About ACTIVATE

What We Do​

The ACTIVATE control plane gives users the ability to create and manage elastic resource pools and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters on virtually any cloud service provider. ACTIVATE is designed to be accessible and universally useful: users can run scripts—called workflows—that are defined in a variety of programming languages across multiple pools and clusters.

ACTIVATE customers use their own cloud accounts to deploy cloud HPC resources via the ACTIVATE control plane, meaning that HPC resources are our customer-deployed solution. While ACTIVATE can be deployed in different locations (i.e., in the cloud or on-premises), it is not deployed by customers directly.

Our goal is to make high-performance simulation and modeling computation as simple as possible, and we're working towards that goal every day.

Working With Cloud Resources​

The process for using cloud resources typically follows these steps:

  • Log in to ACTIVATE.
  • Create or start a cluster with the configuration that best suits your work.
  • Transfer your data to the cloud from an on-premises location or from an object storage, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) buckets, or Microsoft Azure Blob containers.
  • Complete your computations.
  • Transfer your data back to an on-premises location or to object storage.
  • Shut down the cluster.

Essential Cloud Concepts​

Clusters are standard HPC clusters well-suited for supporting the execution of a wide range of parallel applications, including MPI, OpenMP, and GPU-based applications as well as various hybrid combinations. Cloud-based clusters can run a variety of job schedulers, providing an environment that’s familiar to users of traditional HPC clusters. On ACTIVATE, a cluster has one controller node that sends jobs to the compute nodes, which are grouped into partitions.

Workflows are scripts written in a variety of languages and programming models. Typically, workflows orchestrate the execution of applications relevant to your domain, whether that’s computational fluid dynamics for mechanical engineers or molecular modeling for biochemists. Workflows are run on either pools or clusters, depending on the need of the workflow. There are several demonstration and template workflows available in the ACTIVATE Marketplace (see Navigating ACTIVATE > Marketplace for more information).

About This Guide​

We constantly update the ACTIVATE control plane, adding features to make it easier to complete large-scale projects. Our documentation is a work in progress: the following instructions and information will be updated regularly as we work to improve ACTIVATE and our users’ experience.

We would love to hear your feedback. Feel free to share your requests for additional features and thoughts about ACTIVATE at feedback@parallelworks.com.