The National Research Platform: Stretched, Multi-Tenant, Scientific Kubernetes Cluster
Derek Weitzel, Ashton Graves, Sam Albin, Huijun Zhu, Frank Wuerthwein, Mahidhar Tatineni, Dmitry Mishin, Elham Khoda, Mohammad Sada, Larry Smarr, Thomas DeFanti, and John Graham
The National Research Platform (NRP) represents a distributed, multi-tenant Kubernetes-based cyberinfrastructure designed to facilitate collaborative scientific computing. Spanning over 75 locations in the U.S. and internationally, the NRP uniquely integrates varied computational resources, ranging from single nodes to extensive GPU and CPU clusters, to support diverse research workloads including advanced AI and machine learning tasks. It emphasizes flexibility through user-friendly interfaces such as JupyterHub and low level control of resources through direct Kubernetes interaction. Critical operational insights are discussed, including security enhancements using Kubernetes-integrated threat detection, extensive monitoring, and comprehensive accounting systems. This paper highlights the NRP’s growing importance and scalability in addressing the increasing demands for distributed scientific computational resources.
- Conference
- PEARC ’25
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 20 July 2025
- Pages
- Article 69, 1–5
Derek Weitzel, Ashton Graves, Sam Albin, Huijun Zhu, Frank Wuerthwein, Mahidhar Tatineni, Dmitry Mishin, Elham Khoda, Mohammad Sada, Larry Smarr, Thomas DeFanti, and John Graham. 2025. The National Research Platform: Stretched, Multi-Tenant, Scientific Kubernetes Cluster. In Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2025: The Power of Collaboration (PEARC ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 69, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3708035.3736060
@inproceedings{10.1145/3708035.3736060,
author = {Weitzel, Derek and Graves, Ashton and Albin, Sam and Zhu, Huijun and Wuerthwein, Frank and Tatineni, Mahidhar and Mishin, Dmitry and Khoda, Elham and Sada, Mohammad and Smarr, Larry and DeFanti, Thomas and Graham, John},
title = {The National Research Platform: Stretched, Multi-Tenant, Scientific Kubernetes Cluster},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400713989},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3708035.3736060},
doi = {10.1145/3708035.3736060},
booktitle = {Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing 2025: The Power of Collaboration},
articleno = {69},
numpages = {5},
keywords = {Distributed Computing, Kubernetes, High Throughput Computing, Artificial Intelligence},
series = {PEARC '25}
}