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Aerith Netzer edited this page Nov 5, 2025 · 2 revisions

Overview

Impulse is a modular set of python functions and associated CLI tools that interface with supercomputing clusters via fireworks.

Fireworks

Fireworks is a computational workflow manager designed by the MaterialsProject at Berkeley. It was designed to easily define, submit, and analyze jobs on supercomputing clusters. Fireworks uses MongoDB to define compute jobs, submit jobs, get job status, and store the outputs of the jobs.

Impulse provides a thin CLI wrapper around fireworks operations for uploading/downloading data and submitting jobs.

Why Fireworks? Why not go Cloud?

  1. Refer to this wikipedia page.
  2. Fireworks allows us scalability on hardware owned and operated by Northwestern.
  3. We get first-class support from our friends down the hall.
  4. We get compute power at a fraction of the price we would need to run it on AWS.
  5. I like to have fun at work, and this is more fun than just having Mr. Bezos do it all for me.

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