Talapas HPC Automation

Workflow automation for Talapas, the University of Oregon's heterogeneous HPC cluster — a Python tool that pulls pending account requests from the RACS Jira portal and routes each to the right PI for approval.

20251 min read#python #automation #hpc
repo

Overview

Work from my role as Student Administrator at Research Advanced Computer Services (RACS), the group that runs Talapas — the University of Oregon's heterogeneous high-performance computing cluster. This is the infrastructure side of research: the tooling that keeps a shared cluster usable for the labs that depend on it. (Source lives under RACS/ in the repo.)

Account-request automation

New Talapas users request accounts through a portal backed by Jira, and each request needs sign-off from the PI of the research group (PIRG) the user claims. Doing that by hand means reading tickets, looking up PIs, and writing emails — one at a time.

automated_account_requests.py automates the loop: it pulls pending account requests in bulk from the portal via the Jira API, resolves each requester to their PIRG, and emails the corresponding PI for approval. The script is deliberately environment-coupled — it assumes Talapas's directory structure and module setup — because it's an operational tool, not a library.

To be continued

The repo is the growing home for cluster automation and utility scripts from the RACS role; this node will pick up new tools as they land.

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