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Event Details

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Openstack in the Canadian ARC: A real-life use-case
AI, Machine Learning, HPC

Cloud computing has been gaining more and more footprint in the Academic and Research workplaces. Various Advanced Research Computing “ARC” workloads are now being migrated to the Cloud leveraging the flexibility and the on-demand resource availability. Compute Ontario, Westgrid, ACENET, Calcul Quebec and Compute Canada are part of the Canadian picture of ARC that have heavily invested in Openstack Clouds. They operate 4 major Openstack deployments with more than 15,000 physical cores and 7 PB of storage.

We will start by giving a background on ARC in Canada. We will then move to describe some aspects of the existing HPC and Cloud deployments and how they are concurrently utilized to provide the infrastructure for researchers across Canada .  We will tell the story of the usage Openstack in the National Cloud Platform, the growth of the Cloud systems, major initiatives and challenges faced in the unique ARC realm. We will end by giving some real-user success stories


What can I expect to learn?

The sessions aims to introduce the Openstack Community to the Canadian picture of ARC and give the community some background on the following items:

  • Overview of Compute Ontario, Westgrid and Compute Canada 
  • Background of ARC and how it is being utilized in Canada
  • The role of Openstack in Canada’s ARC 
  • An overview of the National Cloud Platform
  • The National Cloud Team, the mandate and how it operates
  • The major initiatives
  • Major Challenges unique to the ARC Realm
  • Success stories
Tuesday, April 30, 4:20pm-5:00pm (10:20pm - 11:00pm UTC)
The Colorado Convention Center - Meeting Room Level - 505/506
View video
Difficulty Level: Intermediate
Tags: Arch / Ops Case Study
Mohamed Elsakhawy
Western University
Mohamed Elsakhawy received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt. He received his M.E.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is an industry expert in Cloud computing with expertise in large-scale multi-site Clouds. He served as the Operational Lead of Compute... FULL PROFILE
Jeff Albert
Senior Unix System Administrator
Jeff Albert is a Senior Unix System Administrator at the University of Victoria with over 12 years of experience, specializing in cloud administration, systems automation, and large-scale deployments. FULL PROFILE
Michael Cave
Senior Unix Systems Adminstrator, Research Services Team, University of Victoria
Mike is a Unix Systems Administrator for the Research Computing Services team at University of Victoria. Our team is responsible for operating research computing systems for the university as well as for Compute Canada. We host a 10,000 core Open Stack cloud backed by 6.5 PB of Ceph storage which is available for reserachers at the university, across Canada, and hosts projects from researchers... FULL PROFILE