Provisioning compute capacity in the cloud should be as straightforward as defining what you need, not where and how to get it. Yet HPC engineers face inconsistent, provider-specific APIs, incompatible provisioning models, and duplicated integration logic across schedulers and clouds. Open Resource Broker (ORB) solves this with a unified, open-source API and abstraction layer for provisioning cloud capacity anywhere.

ORB integrates seamlessly with IBM Spectrum Symphony HostFactory to standardize capacity requests, tracking, and release. Its modular design supports additional schedulers and multiple cloud providers beyond the initial AWS implementation. ORB supports CLI, REST, SDK and MCP APIs for consistent scaling across diverse HPC environments.

We'll demonstrate ORB's architecture, end-to-end provisioning, and resiliency patterns including retries, idempotent operations, and failure recovery. We'll also cover extensibility for new schedulers and cloud APIs.

Built for large-scale financial HPC grids, ORB is now donated to FINOS under Apache 2.0 for open governance. Attendees will learn proven strategies to make HPC capacity management more portable, automated, and sustainable.