Juju Digest, Vol 55, Issue 18

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Hi Bruno

HPC is interesting to us. For 16.04 LTS one of the goals is diskless
MAAS, which is in part driven by a desire to drive large-scale
automation in some of the super-computers where Ubuntu is in heavy use
already. That would dovetail nicely with your interests, by the look of
it, if there were charms of these services.

Mark

On 25/08/15 13:39, Bruno Pereira wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> #about the "what services would you like to see juju'ed" question
>
> I have been working on high performance computing supplying Linux clusters
> to research facilities for the last 2,5 years, one of the things that could
> make (maas +) juju extremely attractive to such institutions and businesses
> would be to see juju charms deploying common HPC cluster services.
>
> A cluster is in principle very easy to setup and composed by very little
> services and required configuration:
>
> - SSH keys between the nodes distribuited;
> - A scheduler for compute jobs (slurm, sge, torque, etc) composed by the
> server and client packages, optional: some sort of database for accounting,
> authentication service (munge is very common) for security;
> - A set of libraries and mpi implementations that the nodes can use to run
> compute jobs.
> - Power control (already implemented in maas if not mistaken) and
> monitoring (nagios or sorts).
>
> That will be your basic cluster structure and should allow you to run jobs
> between nodes.
>
> HPC is niche that can translate to big business. Seeing Ubuntu direct some
> effort to that direction would be, imho, very attractive depending on
> Canonical's will.
>