Abstract
When I first started learning Rust, I didn’t plan to build a tool that would sit at the center of a national HPC infrastructure. I just wanted to explore a new language. Fast forward to today, and that curiosity has grown into Manta—a system application designed to unify and simplify access to CSCS’s Alps infrastructure, which spans multiple geographically distributed HPE Cray EX machines.
This talk is the story of how Manta came to life: from writing my first Rust functions to architecting a tool that exposes both a command-line interface and a robust HTTP API, empowering sysadmins to interact with and build on top of evolving HPC systems. It’s about navigating the challenges of system-level development as a beginner, embracing Rust’s strictness as a guide rather than a hurdle, and learning how to design software that must be forward-compatible with future technologies like OpenCHAMI.
For anyone just starting out with Rust—or wondering if you can build “real” infrastructure tools with it—this is a look behind the curtain. I’ll share the decisions I made, the mistakes I learned from, and why Rust turned out to be the perfect companion on this journey.
