Alces OpenStack Overview

Deployed using the Alces Symphony suite of virtual machine appliances - Alces OpenStack environments are designed to provide users and researchers with the tools required to effectively utilise the resource available to them.

OpenStack can serve as a platform for a research environment, where traditional HPC computing does not fulfill the requirements of researchers - providing on-demand provisioning and access to compute, storage and networking resource.

OpenStack has been widely adopted by the community to meet their high performance compute needs, including NASA and CERN.

The Alces Symphony appliance suite provides a stable platform and architecture from which to base your OpenStack learning experience. The VPN protected secure public network allows easy access to the platform without any site specific access boundaries, and, by standardising upon common research computing methodologies; skills learnt using one symphony-openstack platform are easily transferable to another deployment in another environment.

Why should I use Alces OpenStack?

There are a number of reasons you may wish to use OpenStack as a research compute environment over a traditional HPC cluster environment, including:

• Customisable - researchers can choose both to create their own, hand-crafted virtual machines with their own software - or optionally deploy Alces Clusterware HPC compute environments and customize their own clusters without affecting other researchers.
• Isolation - Through OpenStack networking features, data is isolated from other researchers and machines, particularly useful in data-sensitive research organisations.
• Time-to-research - The ability to self-provision virtual machines and HPC clusters using the Alces tools reduces the time to begin research, as typically seen in shared compute environments.