Presentation

The TGCC cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform which supplements high performance computing resources at TGCC with cloud computing services. This platform is based on OpenStack, an open source cloud computing platform used by both commercial and academic organizations in public and private settings. The following OpenStack services are currently available:

  • Identity (Keystone): authentication and service discovery

  • Compute (Nova): virtual machine (VM) provisioning

  • Block Storage (Cinder): persistent block storage volumes for VMs

  • Image (Glance): disk images used as templates to provision new VMs

  • Networking (Neutron): network connectivity (private networks, public floating IPs, network filtering, …)

  • Orchestration (Heat): orchestration of multiple cloud resources using declarative templates

  • Dashboard (Horizon): web interface to manage these services

The OpenStack platform is hosted on a cluster of 20 compute nodes with 36 cores and 192 Go of RAM each. They are dual-attached to a 10 Gb/s network, in a highly available setup. The storage is provided by a Ceph cluster with a raw capacity of 56 TB backed by SSD disks.

The cluster is currently running the Ussuri version of OpenStack.

If you already have an account, you may access your cloud resources using the OpenStack Dashboard. Authentication instructions along with other means of accessing the cloud are described in the How to connect section. A tutorial describing how to create a VM step-by-step with the web dashboard for first-time users is provided in the Quick start guide. The remainder of the documentation briefly introduces the most important OpenStack concepts and focuses on characteristics specific to the TGCC OpenStack cluster such as the compute center network policy. For a general documentation of OpenStack features, please refer to the official OpenStack documentation.