This article originally appeared on insidehpc.com
NCI Powers Research in the Cloud with Mellanox, RDMA, and OpenStack
April 15, 2014 by Rich Brueckner
Today Mellanox announced that the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australia National University has selected the company's interconnect technologies to support the nation's researchers.
The NCI deployment combines the Mellanox CloudX solution with Red Hat OpenStack software to support high performance workloads on a scalable and easy to manage cloud platform. CloudX simplifies and automates the orchestration of cloud platforms and reduces deployment time from days to hours. The NCI deployment is based on Mellanox 40/56 Gb/s Virtual Protocol Interconnect adapters and switches supporting both InfiniBand and Ethernet. The advanced NCI cloud also utilizes RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) to implement a full fat-tree Ethernet configuration on OpenStack.
"We are pleased to partner with the NCI as they build a scalable, world-class, and efficient cloud platform based on our CloudX interconnect," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "NCI is the first CloudX deployment to take full advantage of RDMA, OpenStack plugins, and Hypervisors offloads delivered by our end-to-end 40GbE Ethernet and 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect solution."
As Australia's national research computing service, NCI has a mission to raise the ambition, impact, and outcomes of Australian research through access to advanced computational and data-intensive methods, support, and high-performance infrastructure.
Market Watch, The Wall Street Journal
April 15, 2014, 8:31 a.m. EDT
Mellanox Delivers InfiniBand and Ethernet CloudX™ Interconnect Cloud Solution at National Computational Infrastructure
National Computational Infrastructure selects Mellanox's End-to-End 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 56Gb/s InfiniBand Virtual Protocol Interconnect Solution to provide leading performance in an OpenStack-based cloudSUNNYVALE, Calif. & YOKNEAM, Israel, Apr 15, 2014 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), hosted at the Australia National University, selected Mellanox's interconnect to support Australia's national research computing service which provides world-class, high-end services to Australia's researchers. Mellanox's interconnect solutions allow for faster inter-node connectivity and access to storage, providing Australian researchers and scientific research organizations with critical on-demand access to NCI's high-performance cloud.
The NCI deployment combines the Mellanox CloudX solution with Red Hat OpenStack software to support high performance workloads on a scalable and easy to manage cloud platform. CloudX simplifies and automates the orchestration of cloud platforms and reduces deployment time from days to hours. The NCI deployment is based on Mellanox 40/56 Gb/s Virtual Protocol Interconnect adapters and switches supporting both InfiniBand and Ethernet. The advanced NCI cloud also utilizes RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) to implement a full fat-tree Ethernet configuration on OpenStack.
"Selecting Mellanox for our high performance switching infrastructure has provided a flexible fabric, allowing us to take advantage of both high speed Ethernet and InfiniBand networking in the one solution," said Allan Williams, NCI associate director, services and technology. "Mellanox's professional services staff that assisted with installation were extremely knowledgeable and professional in the delivery of our solution."
"We are pleased to partner with the NCI as they build a scalable, world-class, and efficient cloud platform based on our CloudX interconnect," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "NCI is the first CloudX deployment to take full advantage of RDMA, OpenStack plugins, and Hypervisors offloads delivered by our end-to-end 40GbE Ethernet and 56Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect solution."
"High performance, private research clouds like Australia National University's provide an early proof point where OpenStack deployments are showing compelling value," said Mike Werner, senior director, global ecosystems at Red Hat. "We are thrilled by Australia National University's early results with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and equally pleased that our continued collaboration with Mellanox is helping to further enterprise advancement and deployment for OpenStack in key areas like this one."
How Red Hat enterprise OpenStack offerings assist education clients
April 15, 2014
Red Hat today said its enterprise OpenStack offerings are assisting clients, which can build scalable private clouds with streamlined management.
Some of the clients shared by Red Hat include Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Midokura, National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at The Australian National University, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, University of Porto, etc.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform version 4.0 delivers optimized foundation for building OpenStack clouds, bringing together trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat's OpenStack technology.
The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a biomedical research institution focused on genomic medicine, is using How Red Hat enterprise OpenStack offerings to create an on-premise cloud with on-demand compute and self-service functionality for post-doctorate medical and biochemistry research students.
Broad Institute chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform as the base for a private cloud pilot that accommodates the volume of sample data used by researchers creating a tumor map to help treat prominent cancers earlier and more effectively.
The two-week installation was based on Cisco hardware running Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and the Broad Institute received mentoring from Red Hat Consulting during the course of the deployment.
James Weatherell, Linux enterprise engineer III, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said: "Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform gave us the strong foundation we needed for building our internal cloud from the ground up, and we look forward to moving to a fully supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our core operating system."
Midokura, a company focused on network virtualization, tapped Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to build their own private internal cloud to provide a scalable, multi-tenant environment for their IT resources.
Midokura's Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, is now used by core development, quality assurance and sales engineers to scale their testing environments and provide better pre- and post-sales support.
Yoshi Tamura, product manager, Midokura, said: "The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform enables us to react faster to customer demands, and is instrumental for our own internal cloud development needs. The solution enabled us to build out our own private cloud on a secure and scalable foundation."
National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at The Australian National University, Australia's national research computing service was the first organization worldwide to deploy the Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
NCI selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform because it offered them a fully supported, upgradable enterprise OpenStack distribution, and the robust security and certifications afforded by Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled them to deploy with confidence.
Allan Williams, associate director, Australian National Computational Infrastructure, said: "When selecting a platform to run our research partner cloud, we were looking for a solution that was robust and backed by an experienced development team."
The University of Porto plans to launch, during first semester of 2014, an Internal Cloud Service with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Storage Server, Red Hat's open software-defined storage offering.
José Antonio Sousa, system administration unit coordinator, ICT services of University of Porto, said:
"We expect the workload volume which we will be able to achieve with this solution to enable us fulfill our entire university community with confidence in our data security and delivery."
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, has deployed Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure to build a hybrid cloud architecture for their High Performance Computing Center.
Yeng Chai SOH, founding director, High Performance Computing Centre, Nanyang Technological University, said: "The flexibility provided by the open architecture of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure enabled us to enhance our virtual environment's performance without having to overhaul current physical resources, and we achieved significant cost-savings with the Red Hat portal, as our administrators can now execute self-provisioning."
Pix source: Red Hat
