GridPP Cloud sites
GridPP Cloud resources at Imperial
A GridPP Cloud pilot service is in testing, hosted at Imperial College. The aim of the pilot is to allow members of GridPP to accrue experience running particle physics workloads using cloud technologies. In this way the community will be better able to make decisions on possible future technology changes for its own facilities and will be in a better position to make use of resources at external cloud providers, if desired.
Technical description
The GridPP Cloud pilot service is currently running the OpenStack Folsom release, which provides an Infrastructure as a Service cloud, compatible with the Amazon Web Services APIs EC2 and S3. The hardware consists of 2 x Dell C6220 servers, one of which is the controller node, 2 x Dell R420 servers for compute and 4 x Viglen Sandy Bridge servers for compute. In total there are 200 cores of compute and 400 GB RAM. A SuperMicro server with 20 TB usable storage is providing object storage, using Swift, with the S3 compatibility layer enabled.
Nova-network is in use at the moment, because at the time of installation the openvswitch modules for Quantum were not available in CentOS and there is still some missing functionality in Quantum.
GlusterFS is under testing to provide distributed storage for Glance (the VM image service).
Provisioning was mostly based on Packstack, which uses Puppet, and is under rapid development.
Access and Usage
Requests for access should be sent to gridpp-cloud-admin@imperial.ac.uk. Once an account has been created, you will be sent a zip file with the credentials needed for access using the Nova and EC2 APIs.
Documentation on how to use the cloud, image availability etc. is under preparation, starting with a basic getting started guide below.
Old status reports
Other GridPP sites' cloud resources
UKI-SCOTGRID-ECDF
Overview
ECDF are currently host an Amazon compatible, Infrastructure as a Service, Cloud pilot. The pilot service started in September 2012. The purpose of this pilot is to understand the processes required and the barriers to overcome in providing such a service; and to deliver a service platform to a number of research projects for the duration of the pilot. At the end of the pilot they will capture descriptions of usage and user experience.
Technical description
The ECDF Cloud Pilot is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) compatible cloud implemented with open-source OpenStack. The Pilot provides an "Infrastructure as a Service" cloud that is compatible with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The hardware consists of a number of IBM x3550 servers, each with two quad-core 3 GHz Xeon processors and 16 GB RAM providing approximately 200 compute cores.
Resources
An overview of the service is provided here:
Links to other documentation relating to the cloud pilot service:
UKI-SOUTHGRID-OX-HEP
Overview
UKI-SOUTHGRID-OX-HEP is hosting an OpenStack based cloud test bed service. The main purpose of this activity is to participate in the GridPP cloud initiative and develop an understanding and knowledge of the cloud framework. We are also looking to explore use cases for our local physics users.
Technical Description
The cloud infrastructure at Oxford is currently running OpenStack Folsom release with multi host Nova-Network. It supports nova-api, Amazon compatible ec2 interface and horizon dashboard. We are also providing a limited number of public IP through floating network address. Currently we have a very small setup with a controller node, one compute node and storage node which provides block storage using OpenStack Cinder. We are planning to add few more compute nodes in near future.
Access and usage:
We are open to provide access to other GridPP sites to test our infrastructure. Request for access can be sent to lcg_admin@physics.ox.ac.uk. We are in the process of preparing a user guide for OpenStack cloud.
