Welcome to the Xenon middleware

Xenon is a middleware abstraction library. It provides a simple programming interface to various pieces of software that can be used to access distributed compute and storage resources.

What problem does Xenon solve?

Many applications use remote storage and compute resources. To do so, they need to include code to interact with the scheduling systems and file transfer protocols used on those remote machines.

Unfortunately, many different scheduler systems and file transfer protocols exist, often with completely different programming interfaces. This makes it hard for applications to switch to a different system or support multiple remote systems simultaneously.

Xenon solves this problem by providing a single programming interface to many different types of remote resources, allowing applications to switch without changing a single line of code.

How does Xenon work?

Xenon is an abstraction layer that sits between your application and the (usually remote) resource it uses. Xenon is written in Java, but is also accessible from other languages (e.g. Python) through its gRPC interface and via the command line.

Ecosystem

• Xenon library

  Java library with local, ssh, ftp, at, slurm, gridengine, torque and webdav adaptors.

• Xenon cloud adaptors

  Java library with Amazon S3 adaptor.

• Xenon grid adaptors

  Java library with gridftp adaptor.

• Xenon hadoop adaptors

  Java library with HDFS adaptor.

• Xenon gRPC server

  Run applications remotely via a gRPC interface.

• Xenon CLI

  Command line interface to Xenon

• pyxenon

  Python API for Xenon

• Docker images

  Docker images with filesystems & schedulers to test Xenon middleware

• Xenon flow

  Run CWL workflows using Xenon