Author Archives: Steve Quenette

R@CMon Storage

Our journey towards R@CMon Storage (Storage-as-a-Service)…

In May 2013 R@CMon went live with an OpenStack cell within the NeCTAR (Australian) Research Cloud confederation. It was an innovation in its own right, targeting the commodity end of both the fundamental and translational research needs of Australia (see R@CMon IDC Spotlight – AMD & DELL). Our technical partner, Dell, has successfully applied the design pattern to many other subsequent Research Cloud nodes, and many other OpenStack based private cloud deployments both nationally and internationally. Shortly after the launch of this initial IaaS compute cell, we introduced Ceph based volume storage, becoming the first volume storage service on the Research Cloud, and in doing so, instigated a collaboration with InkTank (now Redhat). By November 2014 R@CMon launched the “Phase 2” Specialist IaaS cell, an “e”-resource motivated by research that pushes boundaries. Within this cell R@CMon added an RDMA-able interconnect to our storage and compute fabric, instigating an innovative technical collaboration with Mellanox.

Thus R@CMon is an environment to build what we call “21st Century Microscopes” – where researchers orchestrate the instruments, compute, storage, analysis and visualisation themselves, looking down and tuning this 21st century lens, using big data and big computing to make new discoveries.

And accordingly, R@CMon is an environment for innovative data services for the long-tail (if you like – more ICT like). Unashamedly – Our instances of Ceph is what we can “enterprise”, whilst each user or tenant has their own needs on file protocol, capacity and latency.

R@CMon Storage is a collection of storage access methods and underlying storage infrastructure products. Why do we present storage as both front-ends and infrastructure? Because most users want access methods – it should just work, but most microscope builders want infrastructure – it should be a building block. R@CMon Storage is also the Monash operating centre to VicNode – where we explain some of these products.

We now have a series of R@CMon Storage products and services available – ranging from infrastructure products, access methods and data management.

Australia’s Largest University Selects Mellanox CloudX Platform and Open Ethernet Switch Systems for Nationwide Research Initiative

Leave a reply

Yesterday Mellanox made the following press release – “Australia’s Largest University Selects Mellanox CloudX Platform and Open Ethernet Switch Systems for Nationwide Research Initiative“. Through Monash University’s own co-investment into R@CMon, the Mellanox Cloudx products were chosen as the networking technology to Phase 2, providing RDMA capable networking within and between R@CMon Research Cloud and Data (RDSI) facilities. This means our one fabric can run multi-host MPI workloads, and leverage fast I/O storage, but also remain near the cost-point of commodity networking for the resources that are generic and commodity.

This is a key ingredient to the “21st Century Microscope”, where researchers orchestrate the instruments, compute, storage, analysis and visualisation themselves, looking down and tuning this 21st century lens, using big data and big computing to make new discoveries. R@CMon has been designed to be the platform where Australian researchers can lead the way at establishing their own 21st century microscope – for themselves and for their communities.

Once again Monash is leading platform technology innovation and accessibility by example. Through 2015 we look forward to optimising this technology, and encouraging increased self-service to these sorts of technologies.

Download (PDF, Unknown)

R@CMon Phase 2 is here!

Leave a reply

Back in 2012 our submission to NeCTAR planned R@CMon as being delivered in two phases. First a commodity phase, letting the ideals of en masse computing dominate technical choices. We have been operating phase 1 since May 2013. Our new specialist second phase went live in October! R@Cmon phase 2 (R@CMon RDC cell) scales out high-performing and accelerating hardware as driven by the demands of the precinct. Often ‘big data’ is just not possible without ‘big memory’ to hold the problem space without going to disk (x100 slower). Often ‘more memory’ is the barrier, not ‘more cores’. Often ‘I need to interact with a 3D model’. And so on. R@CMon is truly now a scalable and critical mass of self-service, on-demand computing infrastructure. It is also the play-pit where research leaders can build their own 21st century microscopes.

One of the four racks of NeCTAR monash-02. From top to bottom: Mellanox 56G switches, management switch, R820 compute nodes, R720 Ceph storage nodes

In addition to phase 1, phase 2 has –

2064 new Intel virtual cores
3 nodes with 1TB of RAM
10 nodes with GPUs for 3d desktops
3 nodes (the large memory ones) with high-performance PCIe SSD
All standard compute nodes mix SAS & SSD for low-latency local ephemeral storage
All nodes with RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access – the stuff that makes fast, large-scale, multi-node HPC jobs possible) capable networking

As with phase 1, the entire infrastructure is orchestrated through OpenStack and presented on the Australian Research Cloud. R@CMon is once again pioneering research cloud infrastructure, virtualising all these specialist resources.

Over the next week we’ll blog with emerging examples of GPUs, SSDs and 1TB memory machines…

One of the specialist nodes – a quad-socket R820 with 1TB RAM and high-performance PCIe-attached flash