Open Stack

Hi, everybody!

We at CU-Boulder Research Computing are looking at using OpenStack Ironic
for our HPC cluster(s). I’ve got a sysadmin background, so my initial goal
is to simply use OpenStack to deploy our traditional queueing system
(Slurm), and basically use OpenStack (w/Ironic) as a replacement for
Cobbler, xcat, perceus, hand-rolled PXE, or whatever else sysadmin-focused
PXE-based node provisioning solution one might use. That said, once we
have OpenStack (and have some competency with it), we’d presumably be well
positioned to offer actual cloud-y virtualization to our users, or even
offer baremetal instances for direct use for some of our (presumably most
trusted) users.

But how about the rest of you? Are you using OpenStack in your HPC
workloads today? Are you doing “traditional” virtualization? Are you using
the nova-compute baremetal driver? Are you using Ironic? Something even
more exotic?

And, most importantly, how has it worked for you?

I’ve finally got some nodes to start experimenting with, so I hope to have
some real hands-on experience with Ironic soon. (So far, I’ve only been
able to do traditional virtualization on some workstations.)

~jonathon