XRAS at 10 Years: Allocations Software as a Service for the NSF HPC ecosystem

The eXtensible Resource Allocation Service (XRAS), a comprehensive allocations environment for managing the submission, review, and awarding of resource allocations has been essential to managing the resource allocation needs of the national cyberinfrastructure for the past decade. As a software-as-a-service platform, XRAS supports not only the needs of its primary stakeholder program, but also the processes of half a dozen other national and regional resource providers. Over the past decade, XRAS has continuously improved on its original feature set and added new features to better meet the needs of its clients. Today, XRAS supports a core workload of 500 allocation requests each quarter, and the development roadmap for the system is focused on expanding the types of resources XRAS supports, enabling resources to be integrated in novel ways, and increasing the number of resource federations that XRAS can support. In this paper, we describe key aspects of resource allocations that have guided XRAS development; discuss the current XRAS clients and our approach to sustainability; and briefly describe the XRAS architecture and how it integrates with client sites and the ORCID ecosystem. We then turn to the XRAS architecture and client integration capabilities and describe major features of XRAS developed over the past decade. Finally, we outline future work planned for XRAS.