From command line to User-Centric HPC: democratizing access to biomedical research at IEO (European Institute of Oncology)
HPC systems play an essential role in modern biomedical research, but their adoption is often hindered by the complexity of traditional command-line interfaces. At IEO, this challenge was addressed by evolving our HPC infrastructure from a legacy PBS-based system to a modern, user-oriented platform.
SLURM was adopted as workload manager and an integrated software ecosystem was implemented, supporting approximately 200 users, including researchers and clinicians. The platform includes tools for software management and cluster provisioning, such as EasyBuild, Lmod, and Warewulf.
The storage infrastructure was expanded and diversified, introducing a parallel filesystem accessible to users and GPU nodes, enabling more data-intensive workloads compared to the previous system.
A key component of this transformation is Open OnDemand (OOD), a web-based portal that provides intuitive access to HPC resources through graphical interfaces (e.g., Jupyter Notebooks, RStudio, interactive desktops).
Monitoring tools based on Grafana provide visibility into system performance and resource utilization. This transition has broadened access to HPC, with 50 new users after migration and ~90% of the community accessing via OOD, enabling adoption by junior and wet-lab researchers through improved usability.
We present how user-friendly interfaces and advanced monitoring contribute to increased accessibility, improved user experience, and wider adoption of HPC.
Authors: Bosso C., Martiniello G., Vafaei Rad A.