HPC-Europa: towards uniform access to European HPC infrastructures

One of the goals of the HPC-Europa project is to provide users with a Single Point of Access (SPA) to the resources of HPC centers in Europe. To this end, the HPC-Europa Portal is being built to provide transparent, uniform, flexible and intuitive user access to HPC-Europa resources. In this paper, we present a mechanism that enables end-users to transparently access the diverse services available in the HPC-Europa environment. The uniform job submission interface that uses this mechanism, utilizing the job specification description language (JSDL), is described. We also present the architecture of the SPA, based on the GridSphere portal framework. Finally, we discuss the various interoperability problems encountered, in particular those concerning job submission, security and accounting.