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OpenInfra Keynote
Like much of the cloud computing world, open infrastructure has
seen an explosion of use cases around AI and ML. In partnership
with our clients at Graphcore,
StackHPC's John Garbutt was thrilled to present our recent work on
implementing open infrastructure support for Graphcore's groundbreaking
Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU).
Graphcore's radical approach to AI has resulted in a processor
capable of unprecedented performance in AI model training and
inference. With StackHPC's assistance, that powerful AI resource
can now be harnessed and provided as a service by OpenStack clouds
around the world.
The full keynote session is online here:
Presenting our Recent Work on Magnum
For modern compute platforms, OpenStack and Kubernetes make a natural
combination. OpenStack's Magnum service provides easy deployment
and management of Kubernetes clusters on OpenStack infrastructure.
However, the project has struggled lately to keep up with the pace
of development in the Kubernetes ecosystem. A significant reason
for that has been the overhead of developing and maintaining the
implementation of the current Kubernetes driver.
Step forward not one project but two, to implement alternative
Magnum Kubernetes drivers based on ClusterAPI. StackHPC's Matt Pryor and
Mohammed Naser from VEXXHOST presented
recent development work on two ClusterAPI drivers that significantly
improve the agility of the Magnum project and promise to dramatically
improve the experience for LOKI users.
StackHPC's work is being developed as a community effort through
the four opens, and will be
described in detail in a forthcoming blog post here.
Kolla User Forum
StackHPC's Michal Nasiadka is the Project Technical Lead (PTL) for
the Kolla project,
which includes Kolla-Ansible and Kayobe. Michal led a well-attended
forum session for user feedback on the Kolla project.
The Kolla development roadmap was presented and discussed, including
support for new host OSes (Rocky Linux 9 and Ubuntu 22.04), plans
for adding Podman support, improvements for RabbitMQ configuration
and OpenStack services proposed for deprecation in Kolla.
Users also brought interesting feedback and feature requests in several areas:
- Performance enhancements, including using Mitogen
- A request for improved Kolla implementation of new RBAC support for OpenStack projects.
- Pain points relating to unreliable delivery of log messages.
- The possiblity of deploying multiple RabbitMQ instances.
Kubernetes and OpenStack Forum
The rising star of Kubernetes plays an increasing role, both as a
platform workload and also as a method for orchestrating the OpenStack
services themselves.
StackHPC participated in a well-attended discussion about Kubernetes,
ClusterAPI and the OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager (OCCM), as used
for the Azimuth cloud portal.
Hypervisor Upgrades Forum
In collaboration with our colleagues at G Research, John Garbutt ran a well-attended and
lively forum on hypervisor upgrades for production clouds. The
event, somewhat like a self-help group in dynamic, was a constructive
discussion about best practice for maintaining OpenStack compute
hypervisors without causing disruption to production services.
Announcing OpenInfra Europe
StackHPC is proud to be an inaugural supporter of OpenInfra Europe.
This regional grouping has been created to adovcate for European
issues, including governance, sovereignty, data protection and
common interests.
OpenInfra Europe is intended to be complementary to rather than replacing existing interest groups,
such as the Scientific SIG.
The Scientific SIG at Vancouver
The Scientific SIG met as part of the PTG session running as a
companion event to the summit. About 25 attendees participated in
a session led by Stig Telfer (StackHPC's CTO) and Martial Michel,
including both familiar faces and new joiners.
As usual, the social aspect of the gathering is the most fruitful
and global connections were created and cemented.
(with thanks to Andy Botting from ARDC for the photo).
What a great summit!
Get in touch
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from you. Reach out to us via Twitter
or directly via our contact page.