Scientific SIG
Status: Active (@May 2016)
Chairs: Stig Telfer, Blair Bethwaite and Martial Michel
OpenStack Foundation liaison: David F. Flanders <Flanders@OpenStack.org>
Welcome to the OpenStack Scientific Working Group landing page.
Please cite this working group using the #scientific tag on listservs, github, blogs, twitter and other social infrastructure.
Purpose
Aim: The Scientific Working Group is dedicated to representing and advancing the use-cases and needs of research and high-performance computing atop OpenStack. It's also a great forum for cross-institutional collaboration. If you are (or would like to) run OpenStack to support researchers/scientists/academics and/or HPC/HTC, then please join!
Objectives:
- HPC/HTC Infrastructure
- Research Data Infrastructure
- Application Infrastructure
- Social Infrastructure
- Create opportunities for the scientific community to engage the wider OpenStack community, i.e. industry,
Communication
The default communication of our members is via the following open community mailing lists:
- user-committee@lists.openstack.org for coordination of working group activities. Please prefix email subject lines with the tag "[scientific-wg]".
- openstack-operators@lists.openstack.org for operational discussion of scientific OpenStack deployment issues. Please prefix email subject lines with the tag "[scientific]".
Please use the hashtag "scientific" for tagging any etherpad URLs, code, blogs posts, scientific research and/or other social publishing platforms.
Members
No formal membership is required. Please introduce yourself and/or fellow colleagues to this working group using one of the mailing lists below, or by attending one of the IRC meetings.
This group is open to all members of the scientific OpenStack community and supporting vendors.
History
Significant dates for the working group (in reverse chronological order):
- [Please add latest activity for the #scientific-wg here at the top of this list]
- A proposal for hosting a face-to-face working group meeting was drafted at the following document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10d7XDC1yw3thjxMMC1EXJlfmMAcjkfj2wnhH2MJgh9k/edit
- The group was approved by the OpenStack foundation's User Committee board and wiki page minted on 15th January 2016.
- The original proposal and call for nominations was drafted via this etherpad: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/scientific-wg
- The #scientific-wg originated from a conversation in the hallways of the Tokyo OpenStack summit (Oct 2015), ideas originating from John Taylor, Paul Calleja, Stig Telfer, Jonathan Proulx, David F. Flanders, Lauren Sell & Tom Fifield.
Activity Areas
Every OpenStack development cycle, four activity areas are selected to focus on, and working group members gather data on problems and solutions in areas that affect them.
For the Ocata development cycle, the four activity areas are:
- Monitoring and Telemetry
- GPUs in OpenStack
- Data Management and Big Data
- Scientific OpenStack Federation
Scientific OpenStack
The Scientific WG contributes knowledge and experience to the OpenStack Foundation's Scientific OpenStack site.
The Scientific WG also generated and maintains the content for the OpenStack/HPC guide "The Crossroads of Cloud and HPC: OpenStack for Scientific Research", published by the OpenStack Foundation and made available as an ebook.
Meetings
Face-to-Face
The Scientific Working Group usually meets at the OpenStack Summits, and also at operators mid-cycle meetups (where possible).
- Boston Summit May 2017, Boston, MA, USA: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/Scientific-WG-boston
- Newton Design Summit April 2016, Austin, USA: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/scientific-wg-austin-summit-agenda
- Operators mid-cycle February 2016, Manchester, UK: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/MAN-ops-Scientific-WG
Boston Summit, May 2017
The Scientific WG is planning a range activities for the summit in Boston:
IRC Meetings
For the best global coverage, IRC meetings are held in alternating time zones:
- Every two weeks on even weeks, 2100 UTC on Tuesday in IRC channel #openstack-meeting
- Every two weeks on odd weeks, 0900 UTC on Wednesday in IRC channel #openstack-meeting
Full details (including a calendar file) are available at eavesdrop.openstack.org. If you need help getting started with IRC see http://docs.openstack.org/upstream-training/irc.html.
IRC Meeting June 21st 2017
2017-06-21 0900 UTC in channel #openstack-meeting
- Optimal time for future IRC meetings
- 0700 UTC?
- 1100 UTC?
- Scientific application catalogues
- Best practice in use (or POC)
- Plans and collaborations
- Security for research computing instances on OpenStack
IRC Meeting June 13th 2017
- RDMA-enabled data analytics from Ohio State University: Hadoop, Spark, Memcached
- Update on the Open Research Cloud initiative
- Upcoming events:
- ISC 2017 (International Supercomputer Conference)
- Frankfurt, June 18-22nd
- http://isc-hpc.com/overview.html
- Exacomm 2017 (Communication Architectures for HPC, Big Data, Deep Learning and Clouds at Extreme Scale)
- Thursday June 22nd, at ISC
- http://nowlab.cse.ohio-state.edu/exacomm/
- ISC 2017 (International Supercomputer Conference)
IRC Meeting June 7th 2017
2017-06-07 0900 UTC in channel #openstack-meeting
- Experiences using CephFS for cluster filesystems in research computing
- Collecting together research papers: user stories of Scientific OpenStack
- ISC 2017, Frankfurt, June 18-22nd
- Exacomm 2017 - Communication Architectures for HPC, Big Data, Deep Learning and Clouds at Extreme Scale
- Thursday June 22nd at ISC
- http://nowlab.cse.ohio-state.edu/exacomm/
- OpenStack Days UK, London, 26th September
- CFP: https://www.papercall.io/openstackdaysuk - closes June 24th
IRC Meeting May 30th 2017
2017-05-30 2100UTC in channel #openstack-meeting
- Collecting together research papers: user stories of Scientific OpenStack
- Scientific datasets blog from SWITCH
- Working Group activities for the new release cycle
- Any other business
Earlier Meetings
Minutes and transcripts from all previous meetings can be found here.