ColdFront is an open source resource allocation management system designed by the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research to provide a central portal for administration, reporting, and measuring scientific impact of cyberinfrastructure resources. ColdFront is designed to manage allocations for a diverse set of resources including HPC clusters, co-located departmental and lab servers, software licenses, digital storage, scientific instrumentation, cloud subscriptions, and data access requests. It is designed to complement existing tools, such as Slurm and OpenStack, which manage access to individual hardware and software components. Though every institution will have its own policies for granting access to a resource, how that access gets provided is nearly universal. Through the flexibility of ColdFront’s plug-ins, centers can easily automate their access policies with the back-end systems resulting in significant time management cost savings for campuses both small and large. Interest in ColdFront has exploded in the last 18 months and many HPC centers are either evaluating it or using it in production. In this BoF, attendees will hear from a panel of ColdFront adopters at three academic HPC centers who will discuss the various ways they’re using ColdFront to manage access to their resources. CCR staff will provide a roadmap for future development and we'll engage attendees in a Q&A period to round out the session.
