Welcome to the Mochi project

The modern DOE scientific computing portfolio consists of a rich ecosystem of simulation, data analytics, and learning applications, with many distinct data management and analysis needs. The objective of the Mochi project is to design methodologies and tools that allow for the rapid development of distributed data services in support of DOE science. An important aspect of Mochi is composition: common capabilities such as communication, data storage, concurrency management, and group membership are provided under Mochi along with building blocks such as BLOB and key-value stores. These building blocks are mixed together to provide specialized service implementations catering to specific platforms and science needs. Current Mochi research directions include unifying management of disparate data classes from scientific campaigns and applying learning and artificial intelligence to improve the adaptability of data services on heterogeneous DOE platforms.
The Mochi project is a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, and the HDF Group. However, Mochi is also bigger than just these partners: Mochi is an open ecosystem enabling the development of a variety of services both within the DOE and internationally.

Quarterly meeting and newsletter, January 2023

Please join us for the next Mochi quarterly meeting on Thursday, January 26, 2023, at 10am CT. Mochi quarterly meetings are a great opportunity to learn about community activities, share best practices, get help with problems, and find out what’s new in Mochi.

Please suggest agenda items on the Mochi slack space or the [email protected] mailing list.


Microsoft Teams meeting
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Phone Conference ID: 254 649 841#


We plan to discuss the following topics at this meeting:

  • Call for lightning presentations:
    • Do you have something that you would like to present at the Mochi quarterly meeting? We would love to hear about interesting services you have built using Mochi technology, performance results, challenges and obstacles, or all of the above! It may be short notice for this meeting, but please let us know if you would like to share a presentation this week or request a slot for a future meeting.
  • Elasticity support in Margo (Matthieu Dorier):
  • Call for feedback on Mochi tutorial topics
    • The Mochi team is planning to introduce new tutorial material this year (venues TBA).
    • Upcoming tutorials will focus on hands-on exercises that use containers and Mochi service templates to get up and running quickly.
    • What suggestions do you have for us on what points we should cover as we develop this new material?
    • Examples of previous Mochi tutorials can be found at https://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mochi/tutorials/

Quarterly meeting and newsletter, October 2022

Please join us for the next Mochi quarterly meeting on Thursday, October 27, 2022, at 10am CT. Mochi quarterly meetings are a great opportunity to learn about community activities, share best practices, get help with problems, and find out what’s new in Mochi.

Please suggest agenda items on the Mochi slack space or the [email protected] mailing list.


Microsoft Teams meeting
Join on your computer or mobile app
Click here to join the meeting
Or call in (audio only)
+1 630-556-7958,,254649841#   United States, Big Rock

Phone Conference ID: 254 649 841#


We plan to discuss the following topics at this meeting:

Quarterly Newsletter, July 2022

In lieu of our usual software update this quarter, we would instead like to invite the community to join us for the July 28 quarterly meeting to discuss ideas for how to improve the process of bootstrapping, testing, and validating Mochi software environments. This process is more ad-hoc than we would like for it to be right now; anything we can do to formalize and streamline would be a big help in the long run.

If you have any suggestions or comments to share (on this topic or anything else Mochi-related) please connect to the following meeting on Thursday, July 28, at 10:00am CT:

Mochi Quarterly meeting

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Please join our mailing list (see link on the right side of this web site) if you would like to suggest agenda items in advance.

Building Custom Data Services with Mochi BoF, 2022

Team Mochi, along with special guests Philip Davis of the University of Utah and Chris Kelly of Brookhaven National Laboratory, hosted a BoF session entitled “Building Custom Data Services with Mochi” at the 2022 ECP Community BoF Days. Thank you everyone for participating! The slides are now available online on the Mochi Tutorials page.

UPDATE: a full video event is also now available from the tutorials link provided above.

Quarterly Newsletter, April 2022

New tools

  • Mochi-json-vis
    • https://github.com/mochi-hpc/mochi-json-vis
    • A command-line tool that can be used to generate a visual representation of a Mochi Bedrock configuration.
    • This can be helpful to sanity check or better understand service configuration details such as the mapping of providers to execution streams.

Software updates

  • Mochi-thallium 0.10.1 (C++ bindings to Mochi)
    • Adds support for timer_callback
    • Adds logger class and logging functionality
    • Adds access to margo’s underlying configuration, pools, and xstreams
  • Mochi-bedrock 0.4.1 (service configuration framework)
    • Ability to initialize the server with a JX9 script instead of a JSON configuration

Publications

  • Matthieu Dorier, Zhe Wang, Utkarsh Ayachit, Shane Snyder, Robert Ross, Manish Parashar. “Colza: Enabling Elastic In Situ Visualization for High-performance Computing Simulations.” in Proceedings of the 36th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2022) (TO APPEAR)
  • Bradley Settlemyer, George Amvrosiadis, Philip Carns, and Robert Ross. “It’s time to talk about HPC storage: Perspectives on the past and future.” Computing in Science & Engineering, 23(6):63–68, 2021. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9658238

Upcoming events

Building Custom Data Services with Mochi (public BoF)

May 12th, 11:00 AM eastern time

We will provide general updates on the Mochi project, highlight key capabilities related to service composition and key/value stores, and share work from guest speakers about the Mochi messaging layer and successful Mochi use cases:

  • Mercury: platform updates and optimizations for RPC and RDMA communication (Jerome Soumagne, The HDF Group)
  • Chimbuko: scalable application performance analysis and provenance (Chris Kelly, Brookhaven National Laboratory)
  • DataSpaces: extreme-scale data management framework (Philip Davis, University of Utah)

To register, follow this link, expand the Mochi BoF description, and click “Register” — this should provide you with a Zoom link to attend the BoF: https://www.exascaleproject.org/event/ecp-community-bof-days-2022/

Mochi BoF at the ECP Community BoF Days, May 12, 2022

We would like to invite everyone to attend a virtual Mochi BoF session as part of the ECP Community BoF Days:

Building Custom Data Services with Mochi
May 12th, 11:00 AM eastern time

We will provide general updates on the Mochi project, highlight key capabilities related to service composition and key/value stores, and share work from guest speakers about the Mochi messaging layer and successful Mochi use cases:

  • Mercury: platform updates and optimizations for RPC and RDMA communication (Jerome Soumagne, The HDF Group)
  • Chimbuko: scalable application performance analysis and provenance (Chris Kelly, Brookhaven National Laboratory)
  • DataSpaces: extreme-scale data management framework (Philip Davis, University of Utah)

To register, follow this link, expand the Mochi BoF description, and click “Register” — this should provide you with a Zoom link to attend the BoF: https://www.exascaleproject.org/event/ecp-community-bof-days-2022/

Thanks!
–Mochi team

Quarterly newsletter, January 2022

New microservices

  • Mochi-quintain
    • https://github.com/mochi-hpc/mochi-quintain
    • Includes a provider that can be embedded in other services, via Mochi-bedrock or other means, to provide synthetic workload testing capability (i.e., “self-test”)
    • Includes an MPI benchmark that can be used to issue parameterized RPCs to the quintain provider from a large number of concurrent clients to measure response times from a heavily loaded server
    • Some preliminary plotting tools to help understand response time distributions and tail latency
Example distribution of response times for a Quintain provider under load.

Software updates

Platform support

Publications (updated)

Srinivasan Ramesh, Robert B Ross, Matthieu Dorier, Allen D Malony, Philip Carns, and Kevin Huck. SYMBIOMON: A High Performance, Composable Monitoring Service. In 29th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, & Analytics (HiPC). IEEE, 2021.

Upcoming events

  • ECP annual meeting
    • https://www.ecpannualmeeting.com/
    • Tentatively scheduled for May
    • We will host some BoF and/or tutorial content
      • All material will be made publicly available after the event
    • What topics would you like to see covered?

Quarterly Newsletter, October 2021

Project News:

New Microservices:

  • We are happy to introduce a new key/value microservice, called Yokan, to the Mochi framework. You can find more details in the Yokan documentation and Yokan GitHub repository. Yokan aims to provide state-of-the-art key/value storage capabilities on top of Margo, following the best practices of the Mochi methodology. It provides many backends, including BerkeleyDB, GDBM, LevelDB, LMDB, RocksDB, TKRZW, Unqlite, and a number of in-memory key/value stores. It was designed to be highly configurable and highly flexible, making it easy to configure databases using JSON, and to provide your own database implementation if the ones we offer don’t satisfy you. Yokan also provides C++ and Python APIs in addition to the usual C API.

Software updates:

  • Libfabric 1.13.2 has resolved multiple outstanding bugs that impacted Mochi, particularly with the RXM provider which is used on TCP and Verbs networks. Please try it out and report if you have any problems.
  • Mercury version 2.1.0rc2 is now available. This is very close to the final 2.1.0 release of Mercury and is the default version supported in the mochi-spack-packages repository. It includes a UCX network driver, improvements to the shared memory transport, new threading options, and miscellaneous bug fixes.
  • Margo version 0.9.6 has also been released; it includes support for the upcoming Mercury 2.1.0 and performance enhancements that take advantage of upcoming features in Argobots 1.2.

Platform support:

  • Please remember to refer to the Mochi platform configurations repository for suggested configurations for various platforms. We have recently updated several example Spack environment files. Feel free to contribute more!

Contribution policy:

  • The Mochi Contributor License Agreement (CLA) has been updated to streamline the process of contributing source code to the project. We have also installed GitHub action that will automatically prompt you to digitally agree to the CLA terms when you open your first pull request. Let us know if you have any questions.

New/Upcoming Publications:

  • Srinivasan Ramesh, Robert Ross, Matthieu Dorier, Allen Malony, Philip Carns and Kevin Huck. SYMBIOMON: A High Performance, Composable Monitoring Service. TO APPEAR in the 28th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, & Analytics (HiPC 2021)

Mochi selected as a 2021 R&D 100 finalist

UPDATE: Mochi was announced as a R&D 100 winner in the Software/Services category on October 21, 2021! We will post more details soon.

The Mochi project, a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and The HDF Group, has been selected as a finalist for the 2021 R&D 100 Awards. The the R&D 100 Awards have served as the most prestigious innovation awards program for the past 58 years; their mission is to identify and honor the top 100 new technologies of the year. Winners will be announced in November 2021.