ColdFront - Overview

ColdFront is an open source resource and allocation management system designed to provide a central portal for administration, reporting, and measuring scientific impact of cyberinfrastructure resources. ColdFront was created to help high performance computing (HPC) centers manage access to a diverse set of resources across large groups of users and provide a rich set of extensible meta data for comprehensive reporting. The flexiblity of ColdFront allows centers to manage and automate their policies and procedures within the framework provided or extend the functionality with plugins. ColdFront is written in Python and released under the GPLv3 license.

Features

Allocation based system for managing access to resources
Self-service portal for users to request access to resources for their research group
Collection of Project, Grant, and Publication data from users
Center director approval system and annual project review process
Email notifications for expiring/renewing access to resources
Ability to define custom attributes on resources and allocations
Integration with 3^rd party systems for automation, access control, and other system provisioning tasks

Principal investigators (PIs) or Project Owners

Principal investigators (PIs) can use ColdFront as a self-service portal to do the following tasks:

Request allocations to center sources such as clusters, cloud resources, servers, storage, and software licenses
Add/remove user access to/from allocated resources without requiring system administrator interaction
Elevate selected users to 'manager' status, allowing them to handle some of the PI tasks such as request new and renew expiring resource allocations, add/remove users to/from resource allocations, add project data such as grants and publications
Monitor resource utilization such as storage and cloud usage
Receive email notifications for expiring/renewing access to resources as well as notifications when allocations change status - i.e. activated, expired, denied
Provide information such as grants, publications, and other reportable data for periodic review by center director to demonstrate need for the resources

HPC system administrators

HPC system administrators can use ColdFront as a management portal and a command line tool to complete the following tasks:

Approve/deny resource allocation requests
Define when a resource allocation will expire
Associate attributes with resources and allocations for access control automation
Automate job scheduler account management by utilizing attributes on resources and allocations (currently supports the Slurm job scheduler)
Manage availability of resources. Resources can be public or private. Private resources can be made available on per-user or per-group basis
Require PIs to periodically review their projects to ensure user access is kept up to date which helps keep systems secure and data protected
Integrate with multiple authentication options such as local database, LDAP, or OpenIdConnect (FreeIPA-based)

Center directors

Center directors can use ColdFront to do the following:

Measure center impact based on grants, publications, and other research output entered by PIs
Collect return on investment metrics to position HPC center for sustainability
Interact with PIs on project reviews ensuring they provide all required information
Periodically review PI access to center resources
Explore all projects, resource allocations, grants, and publications with read only access

Reference https://coldfront.readthedocs.io/en/latest/