Project Bourne MCP server

Project Bourne

Project Bourne is open-source execution and provenance infrastructure for reproducible scientific and engineering workloads.

It answers: Exactly how did this scientific result come to exist?

Keep AI off the cluster

~~~text Researcher's workstation Linux / macOS │ AI / Agent (optional) │ local stdio MCP ▼ Bourne Control Plane │ ├─ freezes immutable ExecutionPlan ├─ builds/stages versioned Bourne workers └─ uses existing VPN / OpenSSH ▼

HPC login / access node one-shot Bourne Remote Worker │ ├─ validates the plan ├─ verifies staged file digests ├─ stages the execution bundle └─ submits with sbatch / qsub / bsub ▼

Slurm / PBS / IBM LSF │ │ allocates resources ▼

Compute allocation execution-scoped Bourne Compute Worker │ ├─ reads immutable ExecutionPlan ├─ observes actual allocation ├─ reproduces selected environment ├─ performs compute-side preflight ├─ executes exact scientific argv └─ writes durable result evidence ▼

Scientific workload

Later:

Researcher's workstation │ │ existing SSH ▼ Remote Worker: reconcile │ ├─ exact Bourne-owned scheduler job state └─ bounded result evidence ▼ Local Bourne provenance database ~~~

The Remote Worker and Compute Worker are not agents or persistent services; both are short-lived, versioned Bourne workers. Bourne does not SSH directly into compute nodes. Slurm/PBS/LSF places the Compute Worker inside the allocation and owns job lifetime after accepting the submission. The researcher's workstation / control plane may disconnect and reconcile the same execution later.

The HPC path requires no AI, MCP server, AI credential, inbound port, root access, persistent daemon, or public-internet access on the cluster. It uses the researcher's existing OpenSSH configuration and scheduler access. Agents receive typed Bourne operations—not an unrestricted remote shell.

The Bourne control plane is supported and tested on Linux and macOS. Native Windows is not yet validated or supported.

Bourne remains agent-native, not agent-dependent. The CLI and Python services work without an agent or MCP.

Quick Start

Human

Install Project Bourne v0.8.1 from PyPI:

~~~bash python -m pip install "bourneprov==0.8.1"

bourne run python examples/demo.py bourne list bourne show @1

Or execute an ExecutionRequest v2 document:

bourne execute --request bourne.json ~~~

Configure a site-aware SSH workflow with the installed CLI:

~~~bash bourne site add imperial \ --ssh login.example.edu \ --scheduler slurm \ --local-root "$PWD" \ --remote-root /work/$USER/project

bourne discover --site imperial bourne plan --site imperial --request bourne.json --provider constraints.json ~~~

The first plan call prints bounded candidates. A human or agent then makes the preference decision explicitly:

~~~bash bourne plan --site imperial --request bourne.json \ --provider constraints.json \ --trust-provider-classifications \ --candidate sha256:...

bourne execute --plan bourne execution wait ~~~

The trust flag is an explicit review decision for semantic classifications in that declarative provider; the provider cannot grant itself that authority. Use --approve-variant-change PARAMETER or --declare-execution-only PARAMETER for narrower user decisions. If the selected candidate changes a provider-bound JSON input, Bourne preserves the original and automatically binds a separately hashed WorkloadVariant to the plan.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.