Open Composer

Overview

Open Composer is a web application to generate batch job scripts and submit batch jobs for HPC clusters on Open OnDemand.

Open Composer is an Open OnDemand app in the "Jobs" category. Unlike Batch Connect interactive apps, Open Composer provides a graphical interface for creating, previewing, editing, and submitting batch job scripts. It supports multiple job schedulers and can be configured for different HPC applications.

• App type: Workflow Composer (Jobs category)
• Latest release: v3.0.0 (see Changelog)
• License: MIT (see LICENSE file)
• Requirements: Open OnDemand 3.0 or later
• Supported job schedulers: Slurm, PBS Pro, Grid Engine, Fujitsu TCS

Features

• Graphical web interface for generating and submitting batch job scripts
• Multi-scheduler and multi-cluster support
• Job history page with filtering, status tracking, and job cancellation
• One-by-one job cancellation with an animated in-modal progress bar
• Editable job script preview before submission
• Configurable application forms via form.yml
• Dynamic form widgets with conditional visibility and validation
• Support for preprocessing steps via submit sections
• Customizable per-application headers and labels
• Path selector widget for file and directory selection
• My Templates — save, manage, and reuse form configurations
• Nodes page with dynamic GRES columns auto-discovered from the scheduler
• Navbar search bar for quickly finding templates by name, category, or description
• Fully customisable navbar and footer (colours, logo, links)
• Bilingual documentation (English and Japanese)

Deployment

Open Composer opens in its own tab/window when a user clicks the app tile. This is the standard OOD app behaviour and requires no extra configuration beyond installing the app itself.

Use conf.yml.erb.app.example as your starting point:

cd /var/www/ood/apps/sys/
sudo git clone https://github.com/RIKEN-RCCS/OpenComposer.git opencomposer
cd opencomposer
sudo cp conf.yml.erb.app.example conf.yml.erb
# Edit conf.yml.erb for your site

The full navbar is shown by default — Home Directory link, Shell Access, Return-to-OOD button, logo, and the Templates dropdown.

Screenshots

Home page

Application page

History page

Documents

Full documentation (installation, application settings, user manual):

Installation for administrator	EN	JA
Application Settings for administrator	EN	JA
User Manual	EN	JA

Quick Start

Standalone app

The following steps assume administrator privileges. If you do not have administrator privileges, see Section 4. "Installation by general user" in the installation document.

cd /var/www/ood/apps/sys/
sudo git clone https://github.com/RIKEN-RCCS/OpenComposer.git opencomposer
cd opencomposer
sudo cp conf.yml.erb.app.example conf.yml.erb
# Edit conf.yml.erb for your site — see Configuration below

Then reload the OOD dashboard (Help → Restart Web Server). Open Composer will appear in the Jobs category.

Testing

System	Site	Scheduler	Repository
Fugaku	RIKEN RCCS	Fujitsu TCS, Slurm	composer_fugaku
R-CCS Cloud	RIKEN RCCS	Slurm	composer_rccs_cloud

Contributing

For discussions, see the GitHub Discussions.

Troubleshooting

For bugs or feature requests, open an issue with detailed logs and reproduction steps.

Reference

If you use this software in your research or development work, please cite the following publication:

Masahiro Nakao and Keiji Yamamoto. 2025. "Open Composer: A Web-Based Application for Generating and Managing Batch Jobs on HPC Clusters". In Proceedings of the SC '25 Workshops of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC Workshops '25). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 697-704. https://doi.org/10.1145/3731599.3767428

Presentation

• HUST: International Workshop on HPC User Support Tools, St. Louis, USA, Nov. 2025 [Paper] [Slide]
• SupercomputingAsia 2025, Singapore, Mar. 2025 [Poster]
• The 197th HPC Research Symposium, Fukuoka, Japan, Dec. 2024 [Paper] [Slide] (Japanese)

Known Limitations

No major limitations are currently known.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Open OnDemand community for providing a robust ecosystem for HPC web applications. Development of Open Composer has been carried out at RIKEN R-CCS, with significant contributions from RIST.