Implementation Challenges: From HPC to Containers in the Academy

Challenges and solutions in implementing Kubernetes infrastructure and moving scientific computing to containers in the academic environment

• Introduction of efforts made at CERIT-SC/Institute of Computer Science of Masaryk University to implement Kubernetes infrastructure and move scientific computing to containers
• Challenges of multi-tenancy assurance, deploying applications under users, resource sharing, and building trust towards containerization among the research community
• Several created solutions, presentation of European open-source projects, and demonstration of how containers help in the academic environment
• Other issues faced and proposed ideas on new features

The speaker discussed the challenges of providing reasonable data redundancy in building fast shared storage from large SSDs from the volcanoes. The solution of just replicating data would effectively reduce capacity to half or even one third. The team is looking for a more effective solution, such as utilizing some rate six equivalent or rich element codes with better redundancy.

Container computing does not have a lengthy history in the academic environment. Traditionally, HPC holds the first place because of high resource availability, direct multi-tenancy support, and researchers having legacy experience. This session will introduce efforts made at the CERIT-SC/Institute of Computer Science of Masaryk University to implement Kubernetes infrastructure and move scientific computing to containers. We will present challenges of multi-tenancy assurance, deploying applications under users, resource sharing, and building trust towards containerization among the research community. We will discuss several created solutions, present a couple of European open-source projects and demonstrate how containers help in the academic environment. Furthermore, we present other issues we fight and propose ideas on new features.