Delivering Science as a Service: Sci-Orchestra's Cloud-Native Approach to HPC

TL;DR

Sci-Orchestra is a cloud-native framework that automates HPC workflows, simplifies collaboration, and protects intellectual property, enabling scientists to focus on discovery rather than infrastructure management.

Contribution

It introduces an autonomous marketplace and API-driven interface for secure, scalable, and cross-institutional scientific computing on Kubernetes.

Findings

Automates experimental workflows across HPC environments.

Enables rapid deployment and sharing of scientific services.

Supports industry collaborations with secure, proprietary tool testing.

Abstract

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.