Automation of NERSC Application Usage Report

Abstract

Tracking and monitoring the applications run on the NERSC super computers is an important endeavor central to understanding NERSC workloads, providing targeted application support, and predicting future software needs. Annually and upon request, we report to our stakeholder, the Department of Energy (DOE), how computing cycles are split between applications, repositories (projects), DOE offices, and Science Categories. In the past, generating the application usage report was a time consuming process and required much duplication of work from year to year. The results yielded were not extensible to new date ranges nor readily available to curious developers who wanted to see how their programs were being used and how that use compared to the use of other programs over time. This work aimed to streamline the application usage data retrieval and presentation process and remedy these inconveniences. Our work has made it possible for anyone on the web to view a NERSC application usage report for any date range of interest. The website we created can generate a machine time breakdown by applications, repositories, DOE Offices, or Science Categories for any given time period in less than 15 seconds.