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StackHPC is proud to support the Open Infrastructure Foundation's OpenInfra Live, a growing archive of discussions around all things open infra.

As co-chair of the OpenStack Scientific SIG, StackHPC's CTO Stig Telfer moderated a lively discussion between a panel of technology leaders and trail-blazers in the emerging phenomenon of software-defined supercomputing:

• Sadaf Alam, CTO of CSCS the Swiss national supercomputer centre.
• Happy Sithole, Director of CHPC the Cape Town Centre for High-Performance Computing.
• Steve Quenette, Deputy Director of Monash University e-Research Centre.
• Jon Mills, Cloud Computing Technical Team Lead, NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The Open Infrastructure Foundation's SuperUser blog has put together an excellent summary of the session.

OpenStack's supporting role in HPC environments is well established, in a pattern where private cloud provides flexible compute resources in tandem with a dedicated HPC supercomputer. The OpenStack system serves to create models and scenarios for input, and analyse the data generated as outputs from an HPC workload.

This discussion also highlighted the emergence of another, more prominent role for OpenStack, in providing a software-defined supercomputer built entirely using open infrastructure.