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Members of the French OpenStack community were invited to gather at EDF Lab Paris-Saclay on May 22, 2024 for OpenInfra Day France 2024, one of many OpenInfra events organised all around Europe during May and June. StackHPC both participated and was a silver-level sponsor of the event.
The day started with a plenary session of keynotes. After an introduction from the organisers, Thierry Carrez, General Manager for the OpenInfra Foundation, explained how OpenStack has recently seen renewed interest thanks to three main factors:
- Digital sovereignty
- Migration away from VMWare, following its acquisition by Broadcom
- Investment in Accelerated Compute for AI
The Dawn supercomputer, in which StackHPC is involved, was highlighted as a major OpenStack-based compute infrastructure for AI.
Cambridge Dawn system (actually the second fastest UK supercomputer, just behind ARCHER2)
Several of the next keynotes and following talks presented use cases of OpenStack clouds in France from the public and private sectors. One point that came back multiple times was the use of Kolla Ansible to deploy OpenStack. As a major contributor to the Kolla project, StackHPC is proud to be helping so many organisations to successfully operate their OpenStack clouds.
Nubo & Eco: two governmental OpenStack clouds deployed with Kolla Ansible
The French bank Société Générale uses Kolla Ansible
Kayobe was also covered, with Léo Gillot-Lamure describing how he uses it to deploy OpenStack on his home lab.
Léo Gillot-Lamure presenting his use of Kayobe to deploy OpenStack on his home lab
Continuing on the theme of accelerated compute, several talks focused on GPUs.
Erwan Gallen from Red Hat presented a good overview of all the different ways to share access to NVIDIA GPUs (MIG, vGPU, etc.).
Sylvain Bauza, Nova PTL, presented the newest improvements for GPU devices in OpenStack, in particular vGPU live migration and quota support. You can read his slides for more details.
Pierre Riteau from StackHPC presented our current work on Blazar, the OpenStack reservation service, to improve sharing of GPU devices in private clouds. Slides are available online. We will share more details about these functionalities once merged upstream.
Pierre Riteau presenting our work on GPU reservations in Blazar
Another theme was feedback from operators about solving reliability and scaling issues. Société Générale shared how they increased their instance creation success rate by tuning Nova and Neutron parameters. OVH presented improvements they made to RabbitMQ configuration to help it scale in large cloud regions.
Lastly, it is worth mentioning that the environmental impact of OpenStack platforms was also among the concerns at this OpenInfra Day, with an interesting talk on power management and energy efficiency given by Christophe Fontaine from Red Hat.
This is just a sample of the talks given on the day. With three tracks in parallel, there was a lot more covered. Thank you to the organisers for putting this great event together.
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