Utilizing Event-Driven Ansible with ColdFront for HPC Onboarding Automation

Presentation to accompany PEARC26 short paper of the same name: Utilizing Event-Driven Ansible with ColdFront for HPC Onboarding Automation(2026-07-26) doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3785462.3815855

A key part of providing research computing services is the ability to manage access for groups of researchers utilizing high performance computing resources. ColdFront is an open source allocation management software developed by the University at Buffalo Center for Computation Research. As part of implementing this software at the University of British Columbia, the Advanced Research Computing team extended ColdFront’s capabilities to provide automated system actions by utilizing Event-Driven Ansible (EDA). This presentation details the development and integration work that was undertaken to create plugin extensions to ColdFront and the deployment of the EDA endpoint to automate our user onboarding workflow.