[Beowulf] HPC cloud bursting providers?

[Christopher Samuel]

On 21/02/17 12:40, Lachlan Musicman wrote:

> I know that it's been done successfully here by the University of
> Melbourne's Research Platforms team - but they are bursting into the non
> commercial Aust govt Open Stack installation Nectar.

We (I help them with this) did try cloudbursting into the Melbourne Uni
Openstack instance (the same place that provided the VM's for most of
Spartan) but had to give up on it because of a bug in Slurm (since
fixed) and the unreliability of bringing up VM's - from memory we had
one  particular case where it tried to boot about 50 nodes and about 20
of them  failed to start.

So now they just provision extra VM's when they need more and add them
to Slurm and given demand doesn't seem to go down there hasn't been a
need to take any away yet. :-)

So this doesn't really reflect what Jeff was asking about as it's all
the same infrastructure, it's not hitting remote clouds where you have
to figure out how you are going to see your filesystem there, or how to
stage data.

cheers!
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 Melbourne Bioinformatics - The University of Melbourne
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545