Diaspora: Resilience-enabling services for science from HPC to edge computing

As the problems we solve with computers become increasingly complex, we need to coordinate actions across more and more computational systems.

As researchers work together to solve some of the world’s biggest scientific challenges, they need to use computers, scientific instruments, and other devices at multiple sites at once. But such distributed research strategies can be vulnerable to failures and disruptions at multiple points across the network.

The Diaspora project is working to create resilient scientific applications across integrated computing infrastructures. The project is developing a system that will allow scientists to quickly and accurately share information about data, application, and resource status to meet a broad set of resilience needs so that researchers can better manage and overcome potential disruptions in the future. To accomplish this, Diaspora is creating a hierarchical event fabric, developing resilience services, and evaluating these new capabilities in scientific applications.

Diaspora involves researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, SLAC, and John Hopkins University. The project hopes to engage postdocs, students, visiting scientists, and collaborators to help build out these solutions.