Glenna2/Glenna2-Newsletter-Aug-2017
Glenna2 Newsletter, August 2017
Welcome to read the newsletter of the Nordic Glenna2 cloud computing project.
Background:
Glenna2 is the continuation of the Glenna initiative and will be aligned with the efforts and roadmaps of the Nordic national e-infrastructure providers' and other involved organizations. Since these efforts are continually evolving and are still in early stages, it is important to allow a degree of agility in Glenna2 to be able to adapt to evolving national strategies. This will be effectively done within the project via 6-months short term plans and health checks.
Federated cloud collaboration is proposed as an action in the Nordic eScience Action Plan 2.0 which the Nordic Council of Ministers have requested NordForsk to follow up on. NeIC is the body that coordinates the implementation of the five concrete actions on e-Infrastructures included in the action plan.
Glenna2 aims to provide added value to the national cloud and dataintensive computing initiatives by:
1. Supporting national cloud initiatives to sustain affordable IaaS cloud resources through financial support, knowledgeexchange and pooling competency on cloud operations.
2. Using such national resources to establish an internationally leading collaboration on data intensive computing in collaboration with user communities.
3. Leveraging the pooled competency to take responsibility for assessing future hybrid cloud technology and communicate that to the national initiatives.
4. Supporting use of resources by pooling national cloud application expert support and create a Nordic support channel for cloud and big data. The mandate is to sustain a coordinated training and dissemination effort, creating training material and providing application level support to cloud users in all countries.
The project is organised into four Aims. The focus of Aims 1-3 is largely technological, while Aim 4 focuses on disseminating pooled knowledge down to end-users.
More about the four aims and the Glenna2 project can be found at: https://wiki.neic.no/w/ext/img_auth.php/7/7d/Glenna2_Project_Plan.pdf
News:
Kick Off
The Glenna2 project kick off was successfully held at the Clarion hotel Arlanda Sweden on June 7th. Some of the topics covered were data intensive computing platforms, future generation hybrid e-infrastructure and the cPouta OpenStack infrastructure and Pebbles cloud resource management environment.
Thanks to all the participants and especially the speakers for a really enjoyable day!
More info about the event at: https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/Glenna2_Kickoff
Steering Group Meeting June 9th
Subsequent to the Kick off the Glenna2 steering group (SG) met to review recent progress and discuss future strategy. This was the last meeting before the summer. The SG gave it's blessing to the project plan and as part of the decision decided to remove the GDPR target. The SG also gave it's final approval to officially start the project's operative phase and also concerning the name the official name of the project is Glenna2 (without a dash).
The SG discussed suggestions for good key performance indicators (KPIs). In the funding application towards the Nordic Research Council (RCN) together with UNINETT SIGMA 2 and also in preparation to a similar exercise as part of the Finnish Academia of Science evaluation, NeIC has seen the importance of easily understandable KPIs. All the projects are requested to come up with such KPIs. The NeIC XT will also propose some KPIs which should be valuable for all NeIC projects.
The SG is supposed to define the more project specific KPIs. Good KPIs should be measurable and quantifiable.
The European Open Science Cloud initiative was discussd from a Nordic angle subsequent to discussions during the NeIC 2017 conference in particular during the Pooling Competencies and Research Community Engagement workshop.
Andreas Helander participated ina at PLAN-E meeting witha presentation of Glenna-2. EOSC: largely focus on open data, Aim2 in this project is what we could contribute. The scope can't be too wide but potentially it could be called the Nordic Open Science Cloud.
The SG decided we can call Glenna2 the Nordic Science Cloud experiment.
The minutes can be found at: https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/Glenna2/SG-Meeting-2017-06-09
Tech preview: Get your own Kubernetes container orchestration platform in cPouta
You can now launch your own Kubernetes cluster in cPouta with just a few simple commands using a new tool called Magnum. If you already have access to cPouta, it should take about 10 minutes to get up and running. You can find documentation for this new feature in the container orchestration chapter of the Pouta user guide at https://research.csc.fi/pouta-container-orchestration.
This is a technology preview feature for now, so there are some limitations that you should be aware of. Those are listed at the end of the documentation page.
HPC in the cloud
On of the goals of Glenna2 is to investigate solutions for running HPC workloads in the cloud.
Azure is currently providing HPC nodes with Infiniband network capability and we decided to test it out during the summer and commpare to benchmarking done earlier on Amazon EC2.
Please note the surprisingly promising Gromacs results from runs on Azure by Fredrik Robertsen in the report at https://wiki.neic.no/w/ext/img_auth.php/d/d2/High-performance_computing_in_the_cloud_v2.pdf
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About Glenna2:
Glenna2 is a three-year project to continue Nordic collaboration on cloud computing in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The aim of the project is to build on already existing services and infrastructure at the participating centers. The work is supported and directed by the Nordic e-infrastructure providers.
More about the project: https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/Glenna2
The name Glenna is an Icelandic name and means "Opening in the clouds"
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The Glenna2 Newsletter will be sent monthly to team members and affiliated parties.
Feel free to contact me for more information!
On behalf of the Glenna2 team
Dan Still
Glenna2 Project Manager, NeIC https://wiki.neic.no/wiki/Glenna email: Dan.Still@csc.fi tel: +358 50 381 9037
