Open Stack

Joshua:

You may want to ask on the openstack-operators list as well. I know there
are some folks there who are (trying to) deploy OpenStack on top of
Infiniband, with varying degrees of success while fighting with drivers.
You'll also get some insights into storage solutions (mostly Ceph vs.
gluster, I suspect). I haven't come across anybody who's tried to deploy
OpenStack with Lustre: that way lies madness, I think.

Take care,

Lorin


On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Brian Schott <
brian.schott at nimbisservices.com> wrote:

> Joshua,
>
> It is something those of us working the gap between HPC and cloud have
> struggled with.  We lack a strong project team within OpenStack IMHO,
> although there are several small groups doing HPC with OpenStack.
>  Hopefully others will chime in on some other topics, such as Infiniband
> support, but we did some testing with a GRID K2 card for GPU pass-through
> with different hypervisors.  A talk I gave at the OpenStack DC meetup is
> here:
> http://www.slideshare.net/bfschott/nimbis-schott-openstackgpustatus20130618
>
> The short GPU answer is that it is possible with Xen, XenCenter, and XCP
> to passthrough GPUs today, but OpenStack doesn't have support by default in
> Nova.  This is still in a roll-your-own mode for deployment.
>
> Brian
>
> -------------------------------------------------
> Brian Schott, CTO
> Nimbis Services, Inc.
> brian.schott at nimbisservices.com
> ph: 443-274-6064  fx: 443-274-6060
>
>
>
> On Jul 25, 2013, at 4:06 PM, Joshua Dotson <josh at knoesis.org> wrote:
>
> Hello.
>
> A contingent of my organization, the Kno.e.sis Center @ Wright State
> University <http://www.knoesis.org/>, recently received a grant award
> which we intend to use to support a handful of mid-size HPC-style workloads
> (MPI <-- definitely, GPGPU <-- if possible/plausible) in addition to many
> mid-size IaaS-style workloads (MongoDB, Storm, Hadoop, many others).  As a
> third layer, I'm playing with the idea of evaluating an elastic OpenShift
> Origin atop the same infrastructure.  Approximately $400k to $500k will
> hopefully be available for this deployment, though exact numbers are not
> yet available to me.
>
> While I'm prepared to build a home-grown small-to-mid-size "classical"
> HPC, using modern hardware, and a smaller silo for home-grown Openstack for
> the minority stakeholders, I am hoping to find ways of making proponents of
> both workloads simultaneously happy, or close to it.  That is, I would like
> to give my computer scientist users a friendly method of running their
> HPC-style jobs on a combined performance-tuned silo of Openstack.  Doing so
> would load-balance the procured hardware and infrastructure with the users
> who want a Tomcat or a Virtuoso instance.
>
> I see a number of serious issues realizing such a goal.  For example, the
> state of Infiniband vs. Openstack seems not quite
> ready/available/documented/accessible for such use in production, unless
> I'm just blind to the right blogs.  The added myriad abstractions and
> latency virtualization might impose on an HPC task, not to mention cloud
> software defined networking (Quantum, especially when sans hardware
> acceleration), seem likely to really get in the way of practicality,
> economics and efficiency.  That said, most of what we do here isn't HPC, so
> I believe such trade-offs can be agreed upon, if a reasonable job
> scheduling and workload management mechanism can be found and agreed upon
> by all stake holders, grant proposal majority (HPC) and minority (IaaS)
> alike.
>
> I get the impression from my readings that HPC-style deployment (separate
> from job queuing) against the EC2 API should work.  I don't have a good
> feeling that the experience would be particularly friendly, however,
> without paying for closed source applications.  I'm thinking a
> high-performance Ceph install would help bring up the storage end of things
> in a modern open-source CoTS way.  I've not done specific research on
> Lustre + Openstack, but no reports of such a setup have presented
> themselves to me, either.
>
> These blue sky ideas matter nil, it seems, if a sufficiently-large
> high-performance production-quality Openstack deployment is beyond the
> funds to be allotted, which is something else I'm working on.  I've built
> smallish but useful virt-manager, oVirt and Openstack environments here
> already, but none of them are enough for the very-important HPC job
> proposed for this grant.  The scientist running the proposed computation
> gave me following information to clarify what would parity (for his job
> only) his experience running the computation with an external HPC service
> provider.
>
>    - MPI
>    - 20 Gbps Infiniband compute interconnect
>    - 600 cores (those currently used are probably G4 Opteron 2.4 Ghz)
>    - 4 GB RAM per core
>    - at lest 2 TB shared storage, though I'm thinking we need much more
>    for use by our general community
>    - unsure of the storage networking topology
>
> We're in the shopping phase for this grant award and are still playing
> with ideas.  It seems likely to snap back into an old-school HPC, at this
> time.  I've fielded communication about our needs to a number of Openstack
> and hardware providers, on the hope that they can bring something helpful
> to the table.
> Please let know if you can point me in the right direction(s). I'm up to
> reading whatever text is thrown at me on this topic.  :-)
>
> Thanks,
> Joshua
> --
> Joshua M. Dotson
> Systems Administrator
> Kno.e.sis Center
> Wright State University - Dayton, OH
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>
>
>
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>


-- 
Lorin Hochstein
Lead Architect - Cloud Services
Nimbis Services, Inc.
www.nimbisservices.com
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