Swiss Academic Compute Cloud Project Lightning Talk at CH OpenStack User Meeting

Nov. 15 2012Tyanko Alekseyev (UZH)

Markus Eurich (ETH)Dean Flanders (FMI)

Adam Feigin (ETH)Peter Kunszt (ETH)

Sergio Maffioletti (UZH)Sandro Mathys (ETH)

Antonio Messina (UZH)Cristian Mezzanotte (Datalynx)

Riccardo Murri (UZH)Christian Panse (ETH)

Outline

• Orientation• Goals• Problems / solution• Priorities• Servers• Storage• OpenStack

Flash Poll

• Who is actually running OpenStack in production?

You are here.

IaaS

PaaS

SaaS

User or Portal

Hardware

• Users may use any service

• Portals may use any service

• SaaS may or may not be built on top of PaaS or IaaS

• PaaS may or may not be built on top of IaaS

Getting Scientific Compute Resources

• Problems with traditional approach– Slow response time to get hardware.– Under utilized hardware.– Lack of flexibility in shared systems (e.g. clusters).– Support and maintenance of hardware– Not cost effective to use VMWare for servers that are nearly 100%

utilized.• Solution with OpenStack

– Nearly instant response to get new servers.– More efficiently share hardware resources.– Complete flexibility at the OS layer.– Support is taken care of centrally.– KVM is much less expensive than VMWware on a large scale.

Goals

• Researchers can provision their own machines and clusters.

• Tune and customize CPUs, RAM, and I/O for each type of use.

• Ability to cloud burst to private, partner, and private clouds.

• Define a standard OpenStack hardware/software environment that can be shared or replicated to other locations.

Priorities

• Servers– Compute– Memory– I/O options

• Storage– Fast (>200K IOPs)– Unified (NAS and block)– Feautres: snapshot, replication, de-duplication

• Cloud– OpenStack

Capability Computing(Gordon cluster at SDSC)

• Hardware used for Gordon– 1024 node Sandy Bridge Intel E5 (~16K cores)– 300TB of SSD flash– Infiniband and 10gb based– Supernodes (64 sockets + 10TB SSD) via vSMP

from ScaleMP• Virtualization testing on Gordon– KVM running on top of ScaleMP

Server Evaluation

• Servers evaluated– Dell (M620 blades + 10gb + Infiniband)– IBM (X3650 M4 + 10gb + Infiniband)– HP (Cloud Matrix / BL460c + 10gb + Infiniband)

Storage Evaluation

• SSD solutions evaluated (10TB and 20TB configurations):– Skyera– Whiptail– Nimbus Data– Tegile– Nexsan (E18X)– Violin– IBM (RamSan)– SGI– HP (LeftHand, 3PAR)

OpenStack Evaluation• Observations:

– It is still early days for OpenStack…– There is a lot of hype with OpenStack, but there is a lot of momentum as well.– Ubuntu has weak hardware support, but at the moment is the distribution of

choice for OpenStack…• Open questions:

– Defining which distribution to use.– We need to find a provisioning portal.– Moving workloads around.– Cloud bursting.

• Testing– Use of VMWare to create and provision virtual OpenStack environments.– Several distributions will be tested and one will be selected.

SDCD 2012: Supporting Science with Cloud Computing

• November 19 2012, University of Bern, http://www.swing-grid.ch/sdcd2012/

• The EcoCloud Project [EPFL: Anne Wiggins]• Academic Compute Cloud Project at ETH [ETH/SystemsX: Peter Kunszt]• From Bare-Metal to Cloud [ZHAW/ICClab: Andrew Edmonds]• Review of CERN Data Center Infrastructure [CERN: Gavin McCance]• Big Science in the Public Clouds: Watching ATLAS proton collisions at CloudSigma

[CloudSigma: Michael Higgins]• Supporting Research with Flexible Computational Resources [University Oxford: David

Wallom]• The iPlant Collaborative: Science in the Cloud for Plant Biology [University of

Arizona/iPlant: Edwin Skidmore]• Tiny Particle within Huge Data [ETH: Christoph Grab]• Roundtable discussion: Cloud Strategies and thoughts for Researchers in Switzerland