Federation and Interoperability in the Nectar Research Cloud
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Audience Level Beginner Synopsis The Nectar Research Cloud provides an OpenStack cloud for Australia’s academic researchers. Since its inception in 2012 it has grown steadily to over 30,000 CPUs, with over 10,000 registered users from more than 50 research institutions. It is different to many clouds in being a federation across eight organisations, each of which runs cloud infrastructure in one or more data centres and contributes to a distributed help desk and user support. A Nectar core services team runs centralised cloud services. This presentation will give an overview of the experiences, challenges and benefits of running a federated OpenStack cloud and a short demonstration on using the Nectar cloud. We will also describe some current approaches that are looking to extend this federation to encompass other institutions including some in New Zealand, to extend the infrastructure using commercial cloud providers, and to move towards interoperability with the growing number of international science and research clouds through the new Open Research Cloud initiative. Speaker Bio Dr Paul Coddington is a Deputy Director of Nectar, responsible for the Nectar national Research Cloud, and also Deputy Director of eResearch SA. He has over 30 years experience in eResearch including computational science, high performance and distributed computing, cloud computing, software development, and research data management. I am text block. Click edit button to change this text. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
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Federation and Interoperability in the Nectar Research Cloud
- 1. National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources NeCTAR is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy to establish eResearch infrastructure in partnership with Australian research institutions, organisations and research communities. The University of Melbourne has been appointed as the Lead Agent, nectar.org.au National Research Cloud 1 Paul Coddington, Deputy Director, Research Platforms
- 2. Virtual laboratories Research Cloud NeCTAR National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources • Funded by Commonwealth Govt EIF and NCRIS since 2010 • Cloud based infrastructure to enable research collaboration across institutional boundaries • Enable research community to store, access, share, and analyse data National Research Cloud • Computing infrastructure, software and services -‐ at scale • Self-‐service capability to quickly provision resources Virtual Laboratories • Domain-‐oriented online environments • Combine research data, models, analysis tools and workflows • Support national and international collaborative research
- 3. NeCTAR enhances Australian research Enhance capability and competitiveness of Australian research by: • Facilitating knowledge-‐centred innovation § Innovative infrastructure enabling innovative research methodologies § Democratising access to sophisticated digital methods • Accelerating access to research data, tools and models § Bringing together access to modelling and observation; platforms, tools and applications to derive knowledge from data. • Removing barriers to collaboration § Supporting cross-‐institutional and international research collaboration – People build collaborations -‐ technology can reduce barriers to collaboration 3
- 4. NeCTAR Virtual Laboratories Climate and Weather Science Laboratory – Lead: Bureau of Meteorology – 6 Partners § Integrated environment for climate and weather science modelling and data Genomics Virtual Lab – Lead: University of Queensland/University of Melbourne – 9 Partners § Easy access to Genomics tools and resources for Australian biologists. Endocrine Genomics Virtual Lab – Lead: University of Melbourne – 7 Partners § Statistical power for clinical research Marine Virtual Lab – Lead: University of Tasmania – 8 Partners § Ocean observations and modelling to improve planning for marine and coastal environments. All Sky Virtual Observatory – Lead: Astronomy Australia Limited – 4 Partners § Theoretical and observational astronomy data, simulations and tools accessible from your desktop Biodiversity and Climate Change Virtual Lab – Lead: Griffith University – 18 Partners § Simplifies biodiversity-‐climate change modelling. Humanities Network Infrastructure – HuNI – Lead: Deakin University – 13 Partners § Integrating 28 of Australia’s most important cultural datasets Characterisation Virtual Lab – Lead: Monash University – 11 Partners § Integrating Australia’s key research imaging instruments with data and analysis tools on the cloud. Geophysics Virtual Lab – Lead: CSIRO – 7 Partners § Easy access to geophysics workflows, simulations and datasets. Alveo – Human Communications Sciences – Lead: Western Sydney University – 16 Partners § Studying speech, language, text, and music on a larger scale Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory – Lead: Sydney University – 9 Partners § Supporting comprehensive environmental carbon footprinting and sustainability assessments Infrastructure partnerships • High demand § Funded ¼ of proposals • Research institution led § Addressing identified research priorities • Highly networked § Over 35 universities and research orgs participating § Over 1:1 co-‐investment • Collaboratively building collaborative infrastructure 4
- 5. NeCTAR Research Cloud 5 Stemformatics Stem Cell data visualisation on the Cloud. Find and visualise interesting genes in datasets from leading stem cell laboratories on the Research Cloud. •Over 400 users nationally •100 cores, multi-‐site •NCRIS supported. Plant Energy Biology Centre of Excellence Researchers study how plants capture energy from sunlight and how they use that energy to grow and develop. Hosting collaborations with the Max Planck Institute and the Beijing Genomics Institute – on the NeCTAR Research Cloud. Building collaboration on the Research Cloud. “NeCTAR makes it much easier, much faster. It means more collaborations — projects that would have just been too hard to go ahead.” Professor Ian Small, Laureate Fellow, West Australian Scientist of the Year 2015. Cancer Therapeutics CRC “The service, support and responsiveness that we have received from the Nectar team has been first class, and feels like an extension to our own internal support services.” Paul Reeve, Director of Operations, Cancer Therapeutics CRC. Access to cancer research data, tools and visualisation on the NeCTAR Cloud Providing access to analysis and visualisation tools, and over 30TB of cancer research data on the Research Cloud. The Nectar choice was easy, and the migration process seamless. Supporting innovation and collaboration in the business of research.
- 6. The NeCTAR Research Cloud A world first… The NeCTAR Research Cloud is a partnership between 8 institutions and research organisations who are operating Australia’s first federated research cloud. • University of Melbourne • National Computation Infrastructure (NCI) • Monash University • Queensland CyberInfrastructure Foundation (QCIF) • eResearch SA (eRSA) • University of Tasmania • Intersect, NSW • iVEC, WA A single integrated cloud operated by 8 national partners and supporting over 10000 research users.
- 7. Cloud 7 year timeline 7 2011 2013 2014 2015 QCIF 512 cores, Q2 2013 eRSA 2560 cores, Q1 2014 iVec node 2944 cores, Q4 2014 Melbourne 1920 cores, Q1 2012 Melbourne 3840 cores, late 2012 Monash 2560 cores, Q2 2013 NCI 2560 cores, Q1 2014 UTas, 1408 cores, Q2 2014 Intersect node 4352 cores, Q4 2014 National cloud workshops. OpenStack selected in April 2011 First call for nodes Sept 2011 Second call for nodes May 2012 Nectar begins at U. Melbourne POC launched, 300 cores Science clouds program begins 2010 2012 2016
- 8. Some facts Provisioning resources at scale to researchers • Single sign-‐on with University username and password • Supporting diverse needs across the breadth of Australian research • Any researcher, anywhere… 8 40,000 CPU cores 4 PetaBytes 10,000+ registered users since Jan 2012 http://status.rc.nectar.org.au
- 9. Nectar Federation A single national cloud interface • OpenStack cells to support 8 regional sites • Users can request a site – or deploy anywhere. National services • Cloud dashboard (Horizon) and API • Authentication (Keystone, AAF) • Image repository (Glance) Federated services • Object store (Swift) • Compute (Nova) and volume storage (Cinder) • User support, help desk, user guides, documentation 9
- 10. Nectar Federation OpenStack Higher Level Services • Data & analytics – Trove, Sahara, Gnocchi • Application services – Heat, Murano, Magnum • Software defined networking – Neutron • Storage, backup & recovery – Manila National and local resources • Nationally and locally funded cloud resources • National and/or local resource allocations • National standards and local customisations • Standard and specialised instance configurations (GPUs etc) • ‘Golden images’ and community contributed images 10
- 11. NeCTAR Research Cloud Ops Team …a federation of 8 operators (~ 16 FTE total) 11 Core Services Cloud Operators Distributed Help Desk
- 12. Activities used to “glue” distributed ops Six Monthly Tech and Operations Workshops • Physically bringing Core Services, Node Operators and DHD together for 2 days Fortnightly RC-‐ops meetings • Video Conference of Core Services, Node Operators and some DHD Weekly Core Services meetings • Video Conference of Core Services staff from UoM, Monash and NCI Fortnightly DHD meetings • Video Conference of 5 nodes participating in the DHD Monthly Control Group meetings • Video Conference -‐ Node Management, Nectar Directorate, DHD and Ops Mgmt
- 13. Federation Challenges Collaboration is great but not always easy • Federated organisations in Nectar are all very different • Funding contracts and OLAs with Nodes • Have to make it worthwhile to federate into a national service • Scaling out will be interesting, hierarchical model is key Security, access, networking • Security challenges with broad access self-‐service vs managed service • Incident response within Nodes and across the federation
- 14. Challenges Access and cost recovery • Costs covered by institutions not directly by users (has pros and cons) • Allocations process has been fairly ad-‐hoc, moving to more structured • Capacity management across multiple Nodes Authentication and Authorisation • Australian Access Federation (AAF) has worked very well, but some issues § people in institutions not in AAF (e.g. international, govt) • Now trialling NZ access via their SAML federation • Looking forward to EduGAIN to provide international access via SAML • Authorisation not so straightforward
- 15. Future Directions: International Science Clouds Nectar pioneered the way – but others have followed: • Over 22 International Science Clouds established (OpenStack-‐based) § CERN cloud is 250,000 cores § Jetstream at Indiana U is 15000 cores § Chameleon NSF cloud is 16000 cores § UTSA Open Cloud Inst. is 12000 cores § Grid.5000 in France is 8000 cores § CLIMB UK cloud is 7680 cores (4 Unis) § Compute Canada Research Cloud (distributed national resource_ § European Open Science Cloud Nectar is pursuing interoperability with other Science Clouds 15
- 16. Future Directions: Interoperability Want to • Make it easy for researchers to collaborate and share infrastructure, data, applications across institutions, states, countries, research domains • Reuse applications and workflows developed elsewhere • Make use of external resources in private or public cloud • Add Nectar resources to international projects Through involvement with • OpenStack Scientific Working group • Global e-‐Infrastructures Interoperability Working Group • Open Research Cloud Congress (and Declaration) • Other research clouds § Working with NZ institutions to develop a NZ research cloud
- 17. National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources www.nectar.org.au 17