Apache Airavata

Apache Airavata is a software framework for executing and managing computational jobs on distributed computing resources including local clusters, supercomputers, national grids, academic and commercial clouds. Airavata builds on general concepts of service oriented computing, distributed messaging, and workflow composition and orchestration. Airavata bundles a server package with an API, client software development Kits and a general purpose reference UI implementation.

Key Features

• 🔧 Service-oriented architecture with distributed messaging
• 🔄 Fully-managed task lifecycle (environment setup, data staging, execution, and output retrieval)
• ☁️ Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support
• 🖥️ Comprehensive API and SDK ecosystem
• 🌐 Reference UI Implementations

Using Airavata

If you’re a researcher, Airavata offers several ways to streamline your workflows:

1. Submit Batch Jobs via the Airavata Application Portal -- Example
2. Launch Interactive Experiments through the Airavata Research Portal -- Example
3. Explore and run published experiments from the Airavata Research Catalog -- Example
4. Run interactive computational jobs directly from your IDE using Airavata Python SDK -- PyPI

🧱 The Airavata Ecosystem

Apache Airavata is composed of modular components spanning core services, data management, user interfaces, and developer tooling.

🔧 Core Services

• airavata – Main resource management and task orchestration middleware
• airavata-custos – Identity and access management framework
• airavata-mft – Managed file transfer services
• airavata-portals – All frontends for airavata

📦 Data & Metadata Services

• airavata-data-lake – Data lake and storage backend
• airavata-data-catalog – Metadata and search services

📚 Documentation & Branding

• airavata-docs – Developer documentation
• airavata-user-docs – End-user guides
• airavata-admin-user-docs – Admin-focused documentation
• airavata-custos-docs – Custos documentation
• airavata-site – Project website

🧪 Experimental & Research

• airavata-sandbox – Prototypes and early-stage work
• airavata-labs – Experimental projects
• airavata-jupyter-kernel – Jupyter integration
• airavata-cerebrum – Airavata for Neuroscience

🔄 How Airavata Works

Airavata runs as a single unified JVM (Spring Boot + Armeria) that serves gRPC and REST (HTTP/JSON transcoding) on a single port, plus background workers.

graph TB
    subgraph "Docker Infrastructure (compose.yml)"
        DB[(MariaDB<br/>:13306)]
        KFK[Kafka<br/>:9092]
        KC[Keycloak<br/>:18080]
        SFTP[SFTP<br/>:22]
    end

    subgraph "Unified Airavata Server (single JVM)"
        direction TB
        ARMERIA["Armeria :9090<br/>gRPC + REST transcoding"]
        SVC["Service Layer<br/>(airavata-api module)"]
        BG["DB-transactional<br/>ProcessExecutor"]
    end

    SDK[Python SDK] -->|gRPC| ARMERIA
    Portal[Web Portal] -->|REST| ARMERIA
    ARMERIA --> SVC
    SVC --> DB
    BG --> DB
    BG --> KFK
    BG -.->|SFTP/SSH| SFTP
    SVC -.->|auth| KC

Loading

1. Unified Airavata Server (airavata-server)

Entry point: org.apache.airavata.server.AiravataServerMain Started via: tilt up or java -jar airavata-server/target/airavata-server-0.21-SNAPSHOT.jar

The unified server hosts gRPC and REST (via Armeria HTTP/JSON transcoding) on a single port, Spring Boot services (Research, Agent, File Server), and background workers in a single JVM. On startup it:

1. Validates the airavata schema with Hibernate ddl-auto=validate (the schema is built and the tenant seeded outside the JVM before startup — see Quick Start)
2. Starts Armeria server on port 9090 (gRPC + REST transcoding + DocService at /docs)
3. Starts the DB-transactional ProcessExecutor worker pool

Architecture: Service Layer + gRPC Transport

All business logic lives in a transport-agnostic service layer (org.apache.airavata.service.*). gRPC service implementations delegate to services. Proto definitions with google.api.http annotations provide automatic REST transcoding via Armeria.

Service	Responsibility
ExperimentService	Experiment lifecycle (create, launch, clone, terminate, intermediate outputs)
ProjectService	Project CRUD and search
GatewayService	Gateway management and sharing domain setup
ApplicationCatalogService	App modules, deployments, and interfaces
ResourceService	Compute/storage resources, job submission, data movement, storage info
CredentialService	SSH/password credential management with sharing
ResourceSharingService	Resource sharing and access control
GroupResourceProfileService	Group resource profiles and policies
GatewayResourceProfileService	Gateway resource preferences
UserResourceProfileService	User resource preferences
SSHAccountService	SSH account provisioning and validation
DataProductService	Data products and replicas
NotificationService	Notification CRUD
ParserService	Parsers and parsing templates

Shared utilities: SharingHelper (sharing operations), RequestContext (transport-agnostic identity).

Background Services (Spring lifecycle, same JVM)

Service	Responsibility
ProcessExecutor	Orchestration engine — a SmartLifecycle worker pool that claims ready work with SELECT … FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED and walks each experiment's PROCESS → TASK DAG (env setup → data staging → job submission → monitoring) to completion
DbLaunchOrchestrator	Materializes the PROCESS/TASK DAG for an experiment at launch and advances its status
KafkaProxyService	Bridges the remote-agent path over Kafka (KRaft mode)

The DB (PROCESS/TASK/EXEC_STATUS) is the transactional source of truth — exactly-once task claiming across threads and JVM restarts, with no Helix/ZooKeeper/Curator/RabbitMQ on the run path.

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> CREATED
    CREATED --> VALIDATED : validateExperiment
    VALIDATED --> LAUNCHED : launchExperiment
    LAUNCHED --> EXECUTING : ProcessExecutor claims process
    EXECUTING --> MONITORING : job submitted (sbatch over SSH)
    MONITORING --> COMPLETED : sacct reports terminal
    MONITORING --> FAILED : job error
    EXECUTING --> CANCELLED : terminateExperiment
    COMPLETED --> [*]
    FAILED --> [*]
    CANCELLED --> [*]

Loading

graph LR
    subgraph "Startup Sequence"
        direction TB
        A[1. Hibernate validate] --> B[2. Armeria Server :9090]
        B --> C[3. ProcessExecutor worker pool]
        C --> D[4. KafkaProxyService]
    end

Loading

Embedded Spring Boot Services

The following services are embedded in the unified server (not run separately):

Service	Module	Purpose
Agent Service	airavata-api/agent-service	Agent sidecar lifecycle, bidirectional gRPC for interactive jobs
Research Service	airavata-api/research-service	Research catalog, application catalog, data products, output parsing

Additional service modules in airavata-api/:

Module	Purpose
compute-service	HPC resource catalog, resource profiles, resource scheduling
storage-service	Storage resources, data movement interfaces and protocols
credential-service	SSH keys, passwords, credential store
iam-service	Identity, access management, gateways, user profiles
sharing-service	Permissions, groups, tags, resource discovery
orchestration-service	Process/task/job execution, workflow orchestration

🏗️ Getting Started

Prerequisites

Requirement	Version	Check Using
Java SDK	17+	java --version
Apache Maven	3.8+	mvn -v
Docker Engine	20.10+	docker -v
Docker Compose	2.0+	docker compose version
Tilt	0.33+	tilt version

Quick Start (Tilt)

Tilt orchestrates the full development stack — infrastructure, build, and all services — and seeds a ready-to-run tenant. A fresh clone works end to end with no manual setup:

git clone https://github.com/apache/airavata.git
cd airavata
tilt up

tilt up brings up (via compose.yml):

• Infrastructure: MariaDB, Keycloak (realm auto-imported), an SFTP storage server, and a self-contained docker-SLURM cluster
• Unified Airavata Server: gRPC + REST on port 9090, API docs at /docs

The dev tenant is seeded outside the JVM, before the server starts. On a fresh database volume the db container runs its /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d scripts — db/migration/airavata/V1__Baseline_schema.sql (the schema baseline) followed by conf/db/seed.sql (the tenant) — and only then does the server boot and validate that schema (ddl-auto=validate; it never mutates the database). The seed provisions a complete, ready-to-use tenant: the default gateway + sharing groups, the SFTP storage resource + SSH credential, the SLURM compute resource + normal batch queue + group resource profile, the Echo application (module, interface, /bin/echo deployment), and a Default Project — all shared with the default-admin account so they appear in the portal out of the box. The dev SSH keypair (conf/sftp/id_rsa[.pub]) is a committed, fixed dev-only key that matches the seeded (keystore-encrypted) credential. The init runs once per fresh volume; ./devstack/devstack reset (or wiping the db_data volume) re-runs it from scratch.

Open the Tilt UI at http://localhost:10350 to watch all resources turn green.

Run your first experiment (Echo)

The web portal runs from the sibling airavata-portals repo (cd ../airavata-portals && tilt up --port 10351). Once both stacks are green:

1. Open the portal at https://gateway.airavata.host and log in as default-admin / ade4#21242ftfd.
2. Create an experiment: choose the Echo application, the Default Project, and the slurm compute resource (queue normal). The Input_to_Echo field defaults to Hello, Airavata!.
3. Launch it. The experiment runs on the docker-SLURM cluster (env setup → sbatch over SSH → sacct monitoring → SFTP output staging) and reaches COMPLETED, with Echo.stdout containing the echoed input.

Every tilt down / tilt up reproduces this working state from scratch, so anyone who clones the repos can run Echo from the get-go.

Manual Start

docker compose up -d                          # Infrastructure
mvn clean package -DskipTests -T4             # Build
java -jar airavata-server/target/airavata-server-0.21-SNAPSHOT.jar  # Start server

Or use the helper scripts:

./dev-tools/scripts/setup.sh    # Infrastructure + build
./dev-tools/scripts/start.sh    # Start server

Health Monitoring

The Armeria server on port 9090 exposes:

Endpoint	Method	Description
/internal/actuator/health	GET	Health check
/docs	GET	Armeria DocService (API documentation)

Configuration

The main configuration file is airavata-server/src/main/resources/application.yml. Key settings:

• spring.datasource.url — JDBC URL (default: jdbc:mariadb://localhost:13306/airavata)
• armeria.server.port — Armeria server port (default: 9090)
• airavata.security.openid-url — Keycloak realm URL

Integration Tests

mvn test -pl airavata-api -Dgroups=runtime

Server Ports

Transport	Port	Purpose
Armeria	9090	gRPC + REST (HTTP/JSON transcoding), DocService at /docs, health at /internal/actuator/health

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions from the community! Here's how you can help:

1. 🍴 Fork the repository
2. 🌿 Create a feature branch
3. ✨ Make your changes
4. 🧪 Add tests if applicable
5. 📝 Submit a pull request

Learn More:

• Contributing Guidelines
• Code of Conduct
• Developer Resources

Setting up your IDE

Use tilt up to start the full stack, then attach your IDE debugger. For remote debugging, add -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005 to the serve_cmd in the Tiltfile.

💬 Community & Support

Get Help:

• 📧 User Mailing List: users@airavata.apache.org
• 👨‍💻 Developer Mailing List: dev@airavata.apache.org
• 🔗 All Mailing Lists: airavata.apache.org/mailing-list

📄 License

Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor
license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for
additional information regarding copyright ownership.

The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
"License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at:

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed
under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR
CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

See the LICENSE file for complete license details.

---

Made with ❤️ by the Apache Airavata Community