The co-location of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory provides an ideal environment for testing and fine-tuning approaches to tightly couple the facilities. From developing workflow management tools to enabling secure access to on-demand computing, the Argonne team has been building the infrastructure for integrated ALCF-APS research for over a decade.

The collaborative effort made major strides with the launch of the Polaris supercomputer in 2022. To enable real-time autonomous data analysis that scientists can use to drive their experiments, the integration team deployed preemptible queues on Polaris to facilitate on-demand job submissions. Preemption is when a computer recognizes which projects are more urgent than others and moves them to the front of the queue.

Using data collected during an APS experiment, the team was able to complete their first fully automated end-to-end test of the preemptible queues on Polaris with no humans in the loop. The process leverages Globus to manage the numerous high-speed data transfers, ALCF computations, and data cataloging and distribution steps involved in an experiment.

While work continues to enable this capability at more and more APS beamlines, this effort points to a future where the integration of the upgraded APS and the ALCF’s Aurora exascale supercomputer will transform science at Argonne and beyond.