We have recently been working with STFC's IRIS (https://www.iris.ac.uk) federation, adding Cambridge University's Cumulus Supercomputer (87th in November 2018 Top 500 https://www.top500.org/system/179577) into the IRIS federation, and helping other IRIS sites wanting to do something similar. Firstly, we have starting using OpenStack to manage Cumulus.
Exposing these resources using OpenStack have helped provide access to resources in a more flexible way, which has allowed more diverse communities to share the same pool of hardware resources, avoiding the need for costly and unreliable custom dedicated clusters.
Some communities have found Magnum created Kubernetes to be a useful building block. We have used Keystone's Federation, along with Keycloak, to reduce the time spend on user management.
Looking to the future, I talk about what will be needed to help better meet the needs of the STFC IRIS federation.
Many organisations are looking at how they can more effciently provide compute and storage resources to their users. An OpenStack powered supercomputer can really help server a wide variety of applications from a single pool of resources. This helps users get what they need, and also helps the resource provider more easily manage these more diverse workloads.
Come to find out more about the bumps on the road, and how to avoid them.
Registration Opening Soon
Registration will open for you to purchase passes for the OpenStack Summit very soon!
We're excited to see you there!
