Mohammed NaserThe Openstack Day CERN brought along a mix of participants from scientific researchers to engineers to discuss the importance of open collaboration!
The OpenStack Day CERN event in Geneva took place on the 27th of May. It brought along a mix of participants from scientific researchers seeking answers to questions of the universe to engineers that were building infrastructure to power this research. It was an action-packed day talking about how OpenStack and open collaboration can support scientists and help them in their research.
The keynote was presented by the executive Openstack director, Jonathan Bryce, who illustrated the need for open collaboration without boundaries. Some of the renowned companies at the gathering, that not only presented their use cases but also talked about OpenStacks's involvement were as follows:
- Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a frontier in energy and data volume. The company relies heavily on its infrastructure for data analysis regarding answering questions about the universe's evolution. They went on to talk about OpenStack's involvement in what they do and went on to talk about its deployment of 300,000 cores across 3 data centers!
- Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a collaborative effort among organizations to develop the world's largest radio telescope that can measure how galaxies merge to create stars among other extraordinary phenomenons. The SKA mentioned its data challenges as it ingests large amounts of data per second that can be potentially tackled with the help of OpenStack and take advantage of it for high-performance computing workloads.
- NASA Center for Climate Simulation, provider of computing resources for NASA-sponsored scientists and engineers. Their OpenStack private cloud deployment supports this research through benefits like data locality, better platform for lifting and shifting traditional science codes, and the OpenStack APIs provide a unifying vision for managing data center infrastructure so unicorn environments can be created.
- Wellcome Sanger Institute, supporting projects with data-intensive requirements such as transforming the landscape of a wide range of diseases and genome sequencing. They integrate Openstack, Ansible and Ceph in their open infrastructure environment to handle the high-performance computing use cases.
The talk on vGPU took place in the afternoon and was presented by our CEO, Mohammed Naser! You can watch the talk on vGPU.
Other topics that were covered in the afternoon session were FPGA support, OpenStack and Kubernetes integration and details on how the OpenStack community is evolving to accommodate the handling of data-sensitive use cases as those shared by the companies mentioned above.
The technical talks and several use cases shared indicated the need for cross-community integration to further support the scientific research industry. It was a moment of immense pride for the VEXXHOST team to have been represented at such a prestigious symposium!