Tag Archives: 21st century microscope

R@CMon hosted Australia’s first Ceph Day

Ceph Days are a series of regular events in support of the Ceph open source community. They now occur at locations all around the world. In November, R@CMon hosted Australia’s first Ceph Day. The day hosted 70-odd guests, many of which  were from interstate and a few from overseas. There participants were from the research sector, private industry and ICT providers.  It was a fantastic culmination of Australia’s growing Ceph community.

If you don’t already know, Ceph is basically an open-source technology for software-defined cluster-based storage.  It means our storage backend is essentially infinitely scalable, and our focus can shift to the access mechanisms for data.

Check out the promo:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcK6KSA0DN0&w=500&h=281]

R@CMon has pioneered the adoption of Ceph for accessible research data storage and at mid-2013 was the first NeCTAR Research Cloud node to provide un-throttled volume storage. R@CMon has also worked closely with was InkTank and now Redhat to develop the support model for such an enterprise (see Ceph Enterprise – a disruptive period in the storage marketplace).

The day began with the Ceph Community Director – Patrick McGarry. His presentation included information about the upcoming expanded Ceph metrics platform, what the Ceph User Committee has been up to, new community infrastructure for a better contributor experience, and revised open source governance.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joCp3WByV9E&w=500&h=281]

Undoubtedly the highlight of the day was the joint talk given by R@CMon’s very own director – Steve Quenette and technical lead – Blair Bethwaite. Here we explain Ceph in the context of the 21st century microscope – the tool each researcher creates to do modern day research. We also explain how we technically approached creating our fabric.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZNwQieDpfg&w=500&h=281]

R@CMon announced as a Mellanox “HPC Center of Excellence”

At SuperComputing 2015 in Austin our network/fabric partner Mellanox announced R@CMon (Monash University) as a “HPC Centre of Excellence“. A core goal of the HPC CoE is to drive the technological innovations required for the next generation (exascale) supercomputing, whilst also ensuring that such an exascale computer is relevant to modern research. R@CMon is a stand out pioneer at converging cloud, HPC and data, all of which are key to the “next generation”.

“We see Monash as a leader in Cloud and HPC on the Cloud with Openstack, Ceph and Lustre on our Ethernet CloudX platform.” Sudarshan Ramachandran, Regional Sales Manager, Australia & New Zealand

From a fabric innovation point of view, it has been a very productive and exciting 24months for R@CMon. By early 2014 the internal Monash University HPC system “MCC” was burst onto the Research Cloud, allowing a researcher’s own merit the be leveraged with institutional investment. It also represents a shift towards soft HPC, where the size of a HPC system changes regularly with time. Earlier this year we announced our early adoption of RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) using Mellanox technologies. The meant the same fabric used for cloud networking could also be used for HPC and data storage backplanes.  In turn MCC on the R@CMon also enabled RDMA communications, that is, real HPC performance but on an otherwise orchestrated cloud.

 

Finally at the Tokyo OpenSack summit 2015, Mellanox announced R@CMon as debuting the World’s first 100G End-to-End Cloud. This technology eases scaling and heterogeneity of performance aspects. In particular, it sets the basis for processor and storage performance for peak and converged cloud/HPC needs. Watch this space!

 

 

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

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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.

 

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