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Q4 2024 News and Changes

· 5 min read
Olivia Shoup
Olivia Shoup
Technical Writer

An overview of what changed at PW in the fourth quarter of 2024

October​

Updates​

With an update to the PW CLI, users can now use the environment variable PW_API_KEY with tokens to authenticate.

We also improved our changelogs, introducing a new structure that lists recent changes under one of these categories:

  • Enhancements and Features
  • Bug Fixes
  • Documentation Changes
  • Other Changes

November​

News​

Several PW team members attended SuperComputing 2024 in Atlanta.

PW team members at our booth at SC2024. Back row: Stefan Gary, Michael McQuade, Josh McMahan, Brad Redmond, and Matt Long; Middle row: Kade'sha Barnard, Phyllis Rhodes, and Louis Le; Front row: Matthew Shaxted, Yifan Lin, Bethany Johnson, and Ricardo Martinez

We were thrilled to be presented with HPCwire's Editor's Choice Award for Best HPC Cloud Platform during SC. Thank you to everyone who voted for us! You can read more about the award and the voting process here.

HPCwire also featured us in a booth tour video, where our CEO Matthew Shaxted talked about PW's mission and founding. You can also hear ACTIVATE success stories from Dr. Brian Hammond, the Director of Scientific Computing Systems at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Shailesh Shenoy, the Assistant Dean for Information Technology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. You can watch the video here.

Updates​

We added several new features for building workflows.

You can now specify remoteHost and slug when updating a session.

  - uses: parallelworks/update-session
    with:
      slug: 'string' // (optional) appends this slug to the session url
      remoteHost: 'string' // (optional) host to forward session to from the target, defaults to "localhost"
      ... other inputs

You can now also specify if the session will use TLS.

sessions:
  mySession: 
    useTLS: true // (optional) Will use https when connecting to session, should only be turned on if the app requires https.

You can now set default session names on workflows:

session:
  mySession:
    prompt-for-name:
      default: "defaultname"

You can now set environment variables on a job level. Environment variables set at a step level will override the environment variables set at a job level.

jobs:
  main:
    env:
      foo: "bar"
    steps:
      - run: echo ${foo} # bar
      - run: echo ${foo} # baz
         env: 
          foo: "baz" # will override env variable set on job level

Lastly, we made the ACTIVATE sidebar and Home page customizable so that you can remove, add, and rearrange items. You can learn more about that process in Customizing Layouts.

December​

News​

Matthew Shaxted was featured on Hammerspace's podcast, Data Unchained. Matthew and their host Molly Presley discussed application portability, data gravity, and maximizing the potential of cloud computing. You can listen to this episode of Data Unchained at the following links:

HPCwire also published the white paper "Right-Sizing Hybrid Multi-Cloud Infrastructure: Unlocking Agility and Cost Efficiency with Parallel Works." The paper discusses the difficulties that organizations face when it comes to choosing infrastructure capacity, as well as how the ACTIVATE platform can help address those challenges. You can read the paper here.

Updates​

We've updated our workflows with two new concepts: apps and sessions. Apps facilitate streamlined workflow execution. With sessions, you can run an app or workflow and expose a port on the remote system to your browser. The tunneling is all handled by the platform, and the resulting "session" is shareable to other users, so multiple users can access the tunneled service. You can read more about these features here.

We've added support for OpenStack as a provider. For organization administrators, see Adding a Cloud Account to add OpenStack to your organization.

We've completed a major update to our API documentation. Click API Reference above to see commands for:

  • Authentication
  • Organization
  • AI Chat
  • Cluster
  • Provision Status
  • Cluster Images
  • Admin
  • Sessions

When a cluster is running, you can now create an OS snapshot to save all of the cluster's settings. Documentation for this process will be published soon.

Upcoming Events​

From January 12th to the 16th, we'll be at AMS 2025 in booth 550. If you're attending, come see us!

Upcoming Changes​

Our engineers are working on the following features:

  • Kubernetes as a provider
  • support for NetApp OnTap
  • inline custom NFS definition support for cloud clusters and OpenStack
  • manual sessions, which can be started independently from workflows
  • AWS, Azure, and Google support for launching GPU reservations in a Slurm partition

We also have an upcoming redesign of the CSP account onboarding process and infrastructure provisioning process. These features will be combined into a single interface:

  • manage providers
  • limit keys
  • provision infrastructure
  • provision billing infrastructure

You can test this new feature by clicking Username, then Feature Preview.