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ColdFront Events at PEARC26

If you’re attending the PEARC conference there are several opportunities to engage with the ColdFront project.

NOTE: Locations and times may change so check the PEARC schedule!

ColdFront Tutorial

Date & Time: Monday, July 27 9am-12:30pm
Location: Room 200F
Abstract: This hands-on tutorial will step attendees through installing and configuring ColdFront and a report plug-in, custom branding, a basic use case for integrating Slurm, and describe some real-world implementation details & challenges.  If you tried to register and it’s full, please reach out to us!

Birds-of-a-feather session: ColdFront Community Meeting

Date & Time: Tuesday, July 28 11am-12pm
Location: 200B & 200C
Abstract: ColdFront is an open-source resource and allocation management system designed to help cyberinfrastructure (CI) centers efficiently administer shared research computing resources. Developed at the University at Buffalo and now supported by a growing multi-institution collaboration, ColdFront provides a unified portal for managing allocations and integrates with tools such as Slurm, OpenStack, Open OnDemand, and Open XDMoD. Interest in the platform has expanded significantly in recent years, with an active and global user community contributing to its development. This Birds of a Feather session will introduce new attendees to ColdFront, share recent project updates and ecosystem building efforts, and facilitate a community driven discussion on best practices, challenges, and future directions for the platform.
We’ll have door prizes! 

Paper Presentation

Date & Time: Tuesday, July 28 12-12:15pm
Location: Auditorium Room 2
Speaker: Jacob Boschee (University of British Columbia)
Abstract: A key part of providing research computing services is the ability to manage access for groups of researchers utilizing high performance computing resources. ColdFront is an open source allocation management software developed by the University at Buffalo Center for Computation Research. As part of implementing this software at the University of British Columbia, the Advanced Research Computing team extended ColdFront’s capabilities to provide automated system actions by utilizing Event-Driven Ansible (EDA). This paper details the development and integration work that was undertaken to create plugin extensions to ColdFront and the deployment of the EDA endpoint to automate our user onboarding workflow.

Poster Presentation

Location: Exhibit Hall B
Poster Reception – Wednesday, July 29 5-7pm
Authors: Trevor Zimmerman and Robert Grandin | Student Submission
Abstract: SCINet, the HPC network for the USDA Agricultural Research Service, requires a robust system to manage thousands of user accounts that must comply with training‑expiration policies. This poster describes how we adapted ColdFront, an open-source resource management system, to meet these needs while integrating with Red Hat Identity Management (IdM). ColdFront’s native project‑allocation framework was used to model expiration‑based access. We extended the default email functions to send notifications to users, supervisors, and the Virtual Research Support Core. To reconcile ColdFront with IdM, we implemented a two‑tier script set: one‑time import scripts that pull data from IdM into ColdFront, and daily sync scripts that generate snapshots of both systems, detect discrepancies, and automatically updates data in ColdFront. Additional CLI commands and monitoring tools provide insight into email delivery and sync health. Ongoing work focuses on extending the FreeIPA plugin to support an extended LDAP schema, enabling a bi-directional sync between ColdFront and IdM, and integrating project‑management workflows into ColdFront.