Conveners
Bridging Cloud and HPC Workloads with the Renku Platform
- Rok Roškar (SDSC)
- Salim Kayal (Idiap)
Description
Data science projects combine code and data from diverse locations, and compute platforms such as cloud and HPC. Coordinating these resources requires technical knowledge and represents time-consuming overhead, diverts time from core analytical work and impedes collaboration. When resources are not brought together in a repeatable, structured manner, team members struggle to replicate software environments or access necessary datasets, ultimately slowing project progress and hindering knowledge sharing.
Renku addresses these challenges by providing an integrated platform that connects data, code, compute in a unified workspace allowing for seamless transitions between commodity cloud or specialized HPC resources from the same easy-to-use web interface. The platform enables data scientists to launch browser-based interactive computing sessions with software dependencies pre-configured and data and code automatically accessible, thus eliminating setup friction and facilitating seamless collaboration.
Built by the Swiss Data Science Center, Renku is an open source collaboration platform used nationwide for data science projects, research, and teaching. By streamlining the technical infrastructure of data science projects, Renku allows teams to focus on analytical insights rather than resource management, empowering collaborative knowledge building.