1. Introduction

1.1. Overview

The Ensemble Toolkit is a Python framework for developing and executing applications comprised of multiple sets of tasks, aka ensembles. Ensemble Toolkit was originally developed with ensemble-based applications in mind. As our understanding of the variety of workflows in scientific application improved, we realized our approach needs to be more generic. Although our motivation remains that of Ensemble-based applications, from EnTK 0.6 onwards, any application where the task workflow can be expressed as a Directed Acyclic Graph, can be supported.


We will now discuss the high level design of Ensemble Toolkit in order to understand how an application is created and executed.

1.1.1. Design

Ensemble Toolkit Design - high level

Figure 1: High level design of Ensemble Toolkit

Ensemble toolkit consists of several components that serve different purposes. There are three user level components, namely, Pipeline, Stage and Task, that are used directly by the user. The Pipeline, Stage and Task are components used to create the application by describing its task graph. We will soon take a look into how these can be used to create an application.

The Application Manager is an internal component, that takes a workflow described by the user and converts it into a set of workloads, i.e. tasks with no dependencies by parsing through the workflow and identifying, during runtime, tasks with equivalent or no dependencies. The Application Manager also accepts the description of the resource request (with resource label, walltime, cpus, gpus, user credentials) to be created.

The Execution Manager is the last component in Ensemble Toolkit. It accepts the workloads prepared by the Application Manager and executes them on the specified resource using a Runtime system (RTS). Internally, it consists of two subcomponents: ResourceManager and TaskManager, that are responsible for the allocation, management, and deallocation of resources, and execution management of tasks, respectively. The Execution Manager is currently configured to use RADICAL Pilot (RP) as the runtime system, but can be extended to other RTS.

Ensemble Toolkit uses a runtime system as a framework to simply execute tasks on computing infrastructures (CIs). The runtime system is expected to manage the direct interactions with the various software and hardware layers of the CIs, including the heterogeneity amongst various CIs.

More details about how EnTK is designed and implemented can be found here.

1.1.2. Dependencies

Ensemble Toolkit uses RADICAL Pilot (RP) as the runtime system. RP is targeted currently only for a set of high performance computing (HPC) systems (see here). RP can be extended to support more HPC systems by contacting the developers of RP/EnTK or by the user themselves by following this page.

Ensemble Toolkit also relies on RabbitMQ to support messaging capabilities between its various components. Read more about it here.

EnTK also has profiling capabilities and uses Pandas dataframes to store the data. Users can use these dataframes to wrangle the data or directly plot the required fields.

Dependencies such as RP and Pandas are automatically installed when installing EnTK. RabbitMQ, on the other hand, needs to be installed manually by the user. Instructions are provided here.

1.1.3. Five steps to create an application

  1. Use the Pipeline, Stage and Task components to create the workflow.
  2. Create an Application Manager (Amgr) object with required parameters/configurations.
  3. Describe the resource request to be created. Assign resource request description and workflow to the Amgr.
  4. Run the Application Manager.
  5. Sit back and relax!

Jump ahead to take a look at the step by step instructions for an example script here.

1.2. Intended users

Ensemble Toolkit is completely Python based and requires familiarity with the Python language.

Our primary focus is to support domain scientists and enable them to execute their applications at scale on various CIs. This, however, does not mean that this framework cannot be used by users with simpler requirements. Consider using EnTK for its automation and fault-tolerance capabilities, even if it requires no HPC (even on your personal PC!).

Some of our current users are mentioned below.

User Groups Domain
University of Colorado, Denver Biochemistry/ Biophysics
Penn State University Climate Science
Princeton University Seismology
University College of London Biochemistry/ Biophysics Medicine
Rice University Biochemistry/ Biophysics
Stony Brook University Polar Science
Northern Arizona University Polar Science
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Biochemistry/ Biophysics