Rob is a co-founder here at Nimbix. You'll know who I am, because I'm the dude playing the dude, disguised as the other dude wearing a Texas Tech hat on the data-center floor.
I wanted to share a few tips on how you can leverage the NACC API to query for your job status. Both job_name and job_number are optional, but neither, either or both can be specified for your query. Should you not supply either job_name or job_number, then the API will simply return the status of your last five jobs.
To try this out, post your requests to the following URL https://api.nimbix.net:4081/nimbix/nacc_jstatus.
Just in case you forgot your API key, you can always grab this via the NACC portal.
There’s a number of interesting possibilities you can do here once you have this information, you can integrate with an existing dashboard / DevOps tool-set, leverage this info for existing notification / eventing systems you have, or for internal billing and accounting systems.
What are the ways you’re leveraging this information, we’d love to hear from you?
I’m back in the blogging seat today and while I’m here, I wanted to share some our recent UI changes, along with a preview into some new features coming to NACC.
Let’s dive right in and take look at some of these new UI features we recently launched.
Dashboard
The “dashboard” is your single window view into some of following areas, job status, notifications, key job stats, and the ability to quickly launch your most frequent application workflows. You can see on my dashboard that BWA is my most used app, mostly from test cases. BWA really shows the power of NACC in terms of flexibility, in creating multi-step workflows, along with the compute power of our accelerated co-processors.
Task Builder
Our task builder allows for easy to use workflow creation. In my example below, I’m creating a multi-step paired-end read for BWA. Here I can quickly and easily provide my reference database, either provided by Nimbix (already pre-indexed) and or a number of other third party sources. Once I’ve selected my reference database, which could be plant, animal, or human (martian or gremlin anyone?), I’m then able to provide my read sequence inputs and any optional parameters associated with BWA. Lastly as part of our task builder I can provide details on where my output needs to go, again this could be a Nimbix location or any one of our third party locations.
Data Mover
Data movement is a critical part of workflow and data processing. Our v2.1 release allows you to seamlessly move your inputs and outputs to the location of your choosing for both pre and post processing. Currently we support automated data movement for S3, Dropbox, Globus, and any SFTP location. Our automated data movers give our users significant flexibility when it comes to building, and submitting jobs because they’re not having to wait for data movement to occur and or jungle any dependancies within a workflow due to missing inputs / outputs.
Don’t forget that all of the above features can also be leveraged using our API!
More and More Features
You’re asking… and we’re listening and building! We’re heads down on building amazing new features for you. Some of these new features will include true integrated remote visualization. Just think… from a post-processing stand point, you won’t have to move your data back out of the cloud. You’ll simply be able to interact in real-time with your outputs, models, etc. within the Nimbix cloud. We’re also heads down on offering our users the ability to select their desired interconnect at run-time. This means you’ll be able to select either gigE, 10gigE, or Infiniband for your given application. You won’t have to worry about the plumbing of the fabric, just tell our task builder and we’ll make it happen, in real-time. Lastly, we’re working on building and delivering a true DCIM product for our private cloud / colocation users. This will allow for a ton of flexibility around space, power, and cooling management.
The old blog seat is getting a bit uncomfortable now. I’ve shown you a few things about v2.1 and shared a bit of our product roadmap. I’d like to leave you with a small video of NACC in action. If a picture is worth a 1000 words, this video should be worth at least 10′s of thousands of words.
Today, we’re pleased to announce the mid-November release of NACC v2.1. We’ve been hard at work over the last many months to bring you new and exciting features. While there are a number of new features as part of this release, I wanted to bring a few to your attention that I’m most excited about!
There’s no disputing that HPC is hard… we addressed this head on during our first release, by abstracting the complexities of building out your computing environment, and allow you to focus on your dataset and computational tasks.
With our newest release we bring an even better user experience with a new responsive UI. Once you see our new responsive UI, you’ll quickly notice some familiarity. We’re bringing you the world’s first HPC application store. With ease, you’ll now be able to choose your application, choose your tasks and fire your job off, in the fewest clicks possible. Our responsive UI will also enable you to interact with our web service from ANY device, and respond accordingly, whether you’re on a desktop, tablet, or phone. Just think you can now start and monitor your HPC jobs from your Android tablet or iPhone. Increased mobility and fewer clicks equals greater productivity!
Who said notifications aren’t cool? We understand having the right information at the right time and place is critical. We’ve worked hard to provide you with timely notifications, where you choose what you want to see and where you want to see it. NACC v2.1 brings you the best and most flexible job notification system for HPC. Our notification engine has been enhanced to support multiple messaging end-points based on a number different event types. Our newly supported messaging end-points include SMS, and multiple email accounts. Imagine the ability to only SMS your phone when an HPC task completes from your cloud provider, or even automatically notify other team members where the job’s output resides once complete. Or maybe you want your verbose updates going to your email client and start and stop events to your phone. NACC v2.1 brings a truly amazing level of control.
Speaking of job start / completion and input / output results, wouldn’t it be cool to have those inputs / outputs seamlessly moved to the end-point of your choosing? NACC v2.1 now supports the ability to source your data inputs from a number of alternative cloud locations, i.e., S3, Dropbox, any SFTP server, Globus, and your own Nimbix Drop location. This is useful if your data lives on S3, we can consume from S3 and once a job is done… write the results back to your choice of location, such as S3 again or maybe Dropbox, or your own SFTP server. Automated data movement will make your life easier, and take the “wait” out of cloud HPC. Launch your job and we’ll handle the rest.
Automation is a great thing so don’t forget all of the above features and functionality can be leveraged into using our simple, yet powerful API.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about NACC v2.1, mid-November can’t come fast enough for us. Join us in November, we’re changing where HPC is headed.
When we started Nimbix in early 2010, a cloud computing company offering super speed servers for technical applications, our original concept was rooted in our belief that economic forces will drive inevitable change in the way we compute information. I originally named the company Compuconomy. I realize that may sound a bit ridiculous, but I have a technical bent, so it seemed fairly intuitive to me. The idea was that it merged the words “computer” and “economy.” I liked that it had multiple meanings, like the economics of computing, or something along the lines of the future economy depending more and more on high performance computers. After a few phone calls to other businesses where I received long pauses and awkward silences after saying the company name, it was apparent it was a five-syllable mouthful. We ultimately decided that it probably wasn’t a great name for a business; but our view of what the word meant was still important to us.
Consider the evolution of mainframes to low cost commodity servers, or the PC to the tablet. No doubt economic forces helped shape these transitions. We are seeing an explosion of computationally intensive applications emerging across multiple fields, so the idea of continuing to process compute-intensive data with truck loads of standard servers in the face of rising energy costs seems counter-intuitive. With the advent of new hardware acceleration technologies, products that enable computers to run applications hundreds of times faster while consuming less energy and space seem like a better approach. We believe economic forces will once again drive changes in our computing behavior over the long run; perhaps even favoring these new technologies.
After lots of coffee at a local Dallas Starbucks, we ultimately decided on the name Nimbix. It was based on the Latin word, nimbus, for “cloud”, combined with x-cceleration and information. Lucky for us, we were able to grab a domain name and make it work.
Of course, the name Nimbix continues to echo our original thinking; it connotes the idea of being nimble and efficient. And now with a little luck, perseverance, and lots of market demand, Nimbix will become an engine room for the “computer economy.”
