CREATE: OpenStack at King's College London

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Bristol, England: StackHPC Ltd are pleased to announce today, the culmination of a major collaboration with King’s College London on the provision of a Research Computing environment built upon StackHPC’s preferred OpenStack distribution environment, OpenStack Kayobe, with significant input from King’s e-Research staff in making this environment available on Ubuntu Focal 20.04. Previously, OpenStack Kayobe was only supported on CentOS and latterly CentOS Stream (see the matrix of supported options).

The new OpenStack deployment forms the core of the newly launched King’s Computational Research Engineering and Technology Environment (CREATE). CREATE provides the following services:

CREATE Cloud: a private cloud platform to provide flexible, scalable development environments and allow users greater control over their own research computing resources using virtual machines;
CREATE HPC (High Performance Computing): a compute cluster with CPU and GPU nodes, fast network interconnects and shared storage, for large scale simulations and data analytics;
CREATE RDS (Research Data Storage): a very large, highly resilient storage area for longer term curation of research data;
CREATE TRE (Trusted Research Environment): tightly controlled project areas making use of Cloud and HPC resources to process sensitive datasets (e.g. clinical PIID) complying with NHS Digital audit standards (DSPT);
CREATE Web: a self-service web hosting platform for static content (HTML/CSS/JS) and WordPress sites;

See our accompanying press release for full details.