Supercomputing centres have strict policies on the usage of resources, in particular of HPC machines. A classic approach is to submit an application for computing time. After this lengthy process, a personalised user account is created and access is granted usually through SSH-terminal-based login.

This approach is challenged by popular Cloud-Computing providers, who provide platforms with easy single-sign-on, token-based authentication and user-friendly, flexible approaches to computing.

In the LEXIS Platform, we count on a HPC-as-a-Service approach based on the HEAppE solution. The HEAppE middleware allows for a submission of HPC jobs based on flexible authentication against external identity providers or an internal user database. Depending on the computing facility, jobs are then executed under a mapped “classical” HPC-system account (usually a functional account with access to an appropriate computing-time grant the user is eligible to). Job management operations triggered by HEAppE are tracked and logged internally for security purposes.

It can be controlled by job-submission script templates, where, depending on use case, only essential parameters can be modified. These can be exposed via the LEXIS portal for convenient setting by the user.