Delivering Science as a Service: Sci-Orchestra's Cloud-Native Approach to HPC
For scientists and engineers in HPC environments, this framework reduces operational overhead and accelerates collaboration, but it is an incremental improvement over existing orchestration tools.
Sci-Orchestra automates experimental workflows in HPC via a cloud-native orchestration framework, enabling researchers to focus on science rather than infrastructure. Its autonomous marketplace facilitates cross-institutional collaboration and secure black-box integration of proprietary tools.
The increasing complexity of modern computational environments often burdens researchers with infrastructure management, authentication protocols, and container deployments. We present Sci-Orchestra, a layered orchestration framework designed to fully automate experimental workflows, allowing scientists to prioritize scientific discovery over backend operations. By abstracting execution through an API-driven interface, the system assumes responsibility for secure authentication, resource management, and scalable deployment across diverse high-performance computing environments using Kubernetes architectures. A key innovation of Sci-Orchestra is its autonomous marketplace, which serves as a catalyst for cross-institutional collaboration. Through an intuitive user interface, researchers can rapidly deploy and share specialized services via simple selections, eliminating the need for complex installations and technical setups. This modular infrastructure is specifically designed to facilitate industry partnerships as it provides a secure execution environment and allows external collaborators to test and validate proprietary tools without the need for source-code exchange. This ``black-box'' interoperability protects intellectual property while enabling seamless integration into broader scientific pipelines, ultimately accelerating the transition from laboratory prototypes to industrial-scale applications.