The Texas A&M University High Performance Research Computing (TAMU HPRC) Portal is a local installation and adaptation of Open OnDemand (OOD) on the HPRC clusters. The portal provides an advanced cyberinfrastructure that enables HPRC users with various backgrounds to utilize the High Performance Computing (HPC) resources for their research. It also serves as an educational platform for HPRC staff to train their users with cluster technologies and HPC applications. Using OOD for the HPRC portal has three benefits. First, it provides a single point of access to all the HPC resources via a web browser and can greatly simplify HPC workflows. Second, it provides an intuitive user interface that significantly reduces the barrier between users and HPC working environments. Third, the extensible and scalable design makes it easy to accommodate a growing number of users and applications. In addition to the out-of-the-box features, we have extensively customized the Matlab interface for our local needs. We have also developed a dynamic form generation scheme that makes the portal app deployment and management more efficient. We have used the portal in multiple training programs and have received positive feedback from the instructors and the users. To understand the impact of the portal on our users, we analyzed portal access data and conducted a survey among HPRC portal users. We received 148 survey responses out of 554 users who have accessed the portal between March 22, 2018 and April 24, 2019. The responses demonstrate that most users think the apps are useful and they would recommend the portal to other users. Additionally, we provide two use cases from our portal users, one for research and one for training, to demonstrate the usefulness of the portal. Our paper is the first that describes the experience with OOD from an HPC site outside of OSC. Overall, the TAMU HPRC Portal based on OOD provides a robust and simple solution for both novice and experienced users at TAMU HPRC to access HPC resources. It is a valuable addition to the traditional command line based approach.
