Open Stack

Sorry I wasn't able to make yesterday's Scientific Working Group IRC 
meeting.  The discussion looked very interesting.  I would like to +1 
Blair's second idea:

<b1airo> #idea I want to run my (persistent) HPC platform/service using 
OpenStack as the infrastructure provisioning system

This is exactly the use case I am exploring.  We're also in the early 
stages of defining and brainstorming support for complex work flows.

A problem that I see arising from these use case discussions is 
terminology.  Let's consider the two main use cases thrown out 
yesterday, scientific clouds and cloud provisioning of HPC.  If someone 
wants to discuss "scheduling" that will likely mean wildly different 
things in the context of each use case.  Would it be useful, or even 
possible, to agree now on a set of standard definitions that we can use 
to avoid confusion?

For instance, I propose the following:

"Cloud scheduling" - provision-oriented (VMs/bare-metal) scheduling. 
Queued time may be similar to "HPC scheduling" but run time is measured 
in days, weeks, or even months. Example: Nova scheduler

"HPC scheduling" - job-oriented, batch scheduling. Typically queued time 
and run time measured in hours or days. Examples: SLURM, Torque, PBS

I think "accounting" also falls under this overloaded-terminology rubric 
but it's much harder to define.  Even among traditional HPC centers 
there tends to be great variation in how accounting is done.  What other 
terms have folks found to be confusing?

Tim

-- 
Tim Randles
Los Alamos National Lab
trandles at lanl.gov
505-667-0680