Zahra's Summer Internship: Improving Usability and Performance in cc-snapshot

During Zahra’s 2025 summer internship she had the incredible opportunity to collaborate with mentor Paul Marshall (UChicago) on the cc-snapshot project. This included:

Enhancing Usability and Performance in Experimental Environments Management

Maintaining an identical setup and reproducing environments is a challenge in high-performance computing (HPC) and research. HPC experiments are resource-intensive and depend on complex software environments. Existing methods, such as orchestration with containers, create controlled environments, but require careful setup and maintenance. However, snapshotting captures the complete state of a system in a single step, allowing researchers to automatically rebuild and restore identical environments. Although, concerns remain about snapshot efficiency and usability.

For snapshotting to be useful in HPC research, the tools need to be simple and straightforward to use. They also need to perform quickly on large bare metal environments. Therefore, we improved usability and evaluated the performance of cc-snapshot, a snapshotting tool on the Chameleon Cloud testbed. Usability enhancements included new command line options, modular code, and automated tests. To optimize performance, we benchmarked alternative image formats and compression algorithms. The results show that zstd delivered up to 80% faster compression time during snapshot creation compared to zlib, while maintaining similar compression efficiency. These findings demonstrate that snapshotting can be a practical and effective tool to support reproducibility in HPC experiment.

Zahra Temori (University of Delaware), Paul Marshall(UChicago Department of Computer Science), Kate Keahey ( Argonne National Laboratory)

Link to final blog: https://ucsc-ospo.github.io/report/osre25/uchicago/cc-snapshot/20250824-zahratm/

Repository : https://github.com/ChameleonCloud/cc-snapshot/tree/reproducibility-improvements