Enabling Functions Use Cases

These are the “enabling functions” provided by the XSEDE system architecture. They are the common ingredients that enable XSEDE to satisfy the use cases in every other category. Each public research computing community has its own enabling use cases: some that overlap with XSEDE’s, others that are distinct characteristics of the community.

The purpose of enabling functions is to provide a common set of system-wide features that can be used when satisfying other use cases. Enabling functions arise from reviewing a large set of use cases from different types of community members and identifying the common features they share. For example, most use cases—whether from High-Performance Computing, Data Management, Campus Bridging, or Science Gateways—assume there’s a community-wide “login” feature that allows individuals to register, obtain credentials, and then use those credentials to login. Rather than design a custom login feature for every use case, we instead define an enabling function and assume most, if not all, use cases will use it.

XSEDE maintains descriptions of our enabling functions for several reasons. First, they support the introduction of new services from community members and partners by identifying features that must be carefully integrated in order to provide a smooth experience for XSEDE community members. Second, these descriptions allow XSEDE to consider new and better ways to provide each enabling function without unintentionally losing important features in the process. Finally, they support partnership and transition discussions by providing a basis for comparison with other systems.

Each of these enabling functions, with the exception of CAN-05, was originally written as an individual document during the XSEDE-1 project between 2012 and 2015 using a more technical format and terminology. These previous versions are linked in the References section.