Difference between revisions of "William Takeda,PostDocResearcher"

Revision as of 16:03, 23 December 2014

Nishiki University

Daniel Yip (IT Director, Nishiki University IT)
Daichi Nakamura (Cloud / System Administrator, Nishiki University IT)
William Takeda (Post-Doctoral Researcher, Nishiki University)
TBD User (Researcher managing their own OpenStack?)

Nishiki University is a mid-size university focused on research. They have a mid-sized IT infrastructure that runs many mission-critical applications. They are frequently on the cutting edge of new technologies as they are used as part of the course curriculum and for graduate research studies. They value solid, industry standard technology backed up by vendor support that provides stability, reliability, and security.

How do you use Horizon Today?

I use it all the time as it's easier to use than the command line. I use Horizon mostly for allocating 3 instances a month. Every month I get an email from the Administrators telling me how many hours were used. What I like about it is that everyone is able to see everyone's usage.

Are there things you do outside of Horizon?

Yes, I run my own scripts written in Python and still run tools that were installed on the node. The scripts I run include creating the node, installing things on the node and then moving data onto node and tweaking the data placement is optimized, and eventually the data can be visualized.

Once every 2 weeks or so, I need to create a volume or destroy a node.

What are your main responsibilities?

I use OpenStack as the backend for biological computation service that we provide to our scientific community. The other scientists are my customers and they'll upload data and spin up their own resources as needed -- primarily this is analyzing huge amounts of data which can then be visualized and then written up in academic papers. I don't want to bother the Administrators, so I manage resources for my customers or users.

What's your typical day like?

I'll SSH into my cloud instance to check long running jobs (jobs that ran overnight), move data onto my computer, examine the data, then make visualizations (based on visualization tools I developed using Python). Prior to that, I have to deal with numerous, slightly different data formats that drive a lot of the work and also load into the cloud. After the job completes, I examine the data, which takes quite a bit of time as it means sifting through the data, inspecting it, and scrubbing it before it can be analyzed and/or visualized. I then email my customers to find out what needs to be done with their data. Once I get through that, I'm working on writing papers about tools that I built and write method papers for researchers who may not know how to use tools.

Are you involved in the OpenStack Community?

I encourage my team to contribute to the community on their own time, but we don't spend much time in the code ourselves. Our infrastructure is working well now, and we have many users using it, so we are only going to replace that with code that is ready for deployment. If it is not ready, then we can't use it. I know we've done some backports in certain circumstances due to some unique hardware and/or applications we have in-house.

Daichi has been active helping with the OpenStack community with the Operator's working group and has helped with the Operator's User Guide and Security Guide for OpenStack.

What are the key obstacles that you see with OpenStack Today?

The biggest issue right now with OpenStack is that I need to hire or train people to build and manage OpenStack. Although it takes relatively few staff to run an OpenStack installation, finding staff with the skills to build it or to set it up is proving hard to find. We've partnered up with some of the programs to develop programs and areas that would give students the ability to experiment and learn OpenStack as part of their university curriculum.

Status: Draft

Data source: OpenStack and non-OpenStack Customer interviews

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 ====<font color="#00B0DA">What are your main responsibilities?</font> ====
 I use OpenStack as the backend for biological computation service that we provide to our scientific community.  The other scientists are my customers and they'll upload data and spin up their own resources as needed -- primarily this is analyzing huge amounts of data which can then be visualized and then written up in academic papers.  I don't want to bother the Administrators, so I manage resources for my customers or users.
+====<font color="#00B0DA">What's your typical day like?</font> ====
+I'll SSH into my cloud instance to check long running jobs (jobs that ran overnight), move data onto my computer, examine the data, then make visualizations (based on visualization tools I developed using Python).  Prior to that, I have to deal with numerous, slightly different data formats that drive a lot of the work and also load into the cloud.  After the job completes, I examine the data, which takes quite a bit of time as it means sifting through the data, inspecting it, and scrubbing it before it can be analyzed and/or visualized.
+I then email my customers to find out what needs to be done with their data.  Once I get through that, I'm working on writing papers about tools that I built and write method papers for researchers who may not know how to use tools.
 ====<font color="#00B0DA">Are you involved in the OpenStack Community?</font> ====

Difference between revisions of "William Takeda,PostDocResearcher"

Revision as of 16:03, 23 December 2014

Contents

"Lead with speed and agility while keeping the same budget."

Daily Horizon Usage

Location

Nishiki University