Asperitas and cloud solutions family

Asperitas and cloud solutions family

Asperitas is a platform for data storage and performing complex resource-intensive calculations on demand. It includes a cloud environment also called Asperitas (listed as No. 5921 in the Unified Register of Russian Programs) as well as Michman, a PaaS orchestrator, and Clouni, an IaaS orchestrator. Fanlight, a web laboratories platform, is also a part of ISP RAS cloud solutions family (listed in the Register as No. 6066).

Asperitas cloud environment

Asperitas is based on Openstack and Ceph and was created in a joint project with Dell. It is designed for computations using large amounts of available resources. Asperitas is based on modern open source technologies that are ubiquitous for building large private clouds. The distribution delivery uses an external HDD drive containing a TUI installer for a deployment node and all the necessary tools for launching the deployment process.

Asperitas provides:

• An onsite installation option (the provided infrastructure can be installed and fully controlled in an isolated environment due to the usage of open standards and software as well as ISP RAS research).
• High security (the environment is built on top of a smaller code base and uses know-how solutions that increase security including a UEFI-firmware with hardened runtime supporting optional integrity checking for Windows and Linux VMs).
• Virtual networks and computational clusters management using Keystone, Neutron and Nova (similar to Amazon EC2).
• Block storage and scalable object storage is based on the Ceph distributed file system.
• Adaptation to specific problem classes (e.g. continuum mechanics, big data analysis, program analysis for defect detection etc.).

Michman, a universal orchestrator

Michman is a PaaS services orchestration tool for a cloud environment performing big data analysis, machine learning, running distributed programs on clusters and storing large amounts of data. It supports automatic cluster deployment with fully set up machines. Users can create clusters in isolated projects and monitor the status of deployed services and clusters in real time.

Michman is able to deploy virtual clusters with PaaS services on demand, including:

• A big data analysis cluster with arbitrary number of nodes having Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Apache Ignite and Jupyter Notebook fully set up and ready to work.
• A database for storing large data such as PostgreSQL, Apache Cassandra, CouchDB, ClickHouse or Redis. Some of the databases can be deployed in a distributed mode.
• NextCloud storage and file exchange system.
• Slurm, a cluster management and job scheduling system.
• Kubernetes, a container orchestration system.

Michman provides:

• A service for users and isolated groups management with REST API.
• Storing the data regarding deployed clusters and services, their status, and access points.
• Storing cluster templates ready for deployment.
• Deploying complex distributed systems on demand with arbitrary service combinations.
• Managing service dependencies including per-version dependencies.
• Local deployment without Internet access.
• Storing detailed data regarding available services, their versions and parameters.
• Easy service addition using REST API.
• Integration with IaaS cloud virtualization systems.

Alongside with Michman Asperitas distribution includes Clouni, a tool for translating TOSCA Simple Profile YAML patterns to IaaS deployment scenarios based on Ansible.

https://github.com/ispras/michman, https://michman.ispras.ru

Fanlight

Fanlight is a platform for providing virtual desktops (DaaS - Desktop as a Service). It allows deploying SaaS infrastructure for computing web-laboratories. It was created as a result of ISP RAS participation in the University Cluster program and in the international Open Cirrus project (founded by HP, Intel and Yahoo). Fanlight is based on container technologies, unlike most solutions of this class based on virtual machines. Initially, the platform had been based on the Docker Compose technology. Later on, a Kubernetes-based implementation appeared. It only supports applications developed for Linux kernel-based OS. Fanlight is included in the Unified Registry of Russian Software (No. 6066).

Other advantages of Fanlight:

• High efficiency of work with cloud calculations due to the use of containers:
  • comfortable work with heavy engineering CAD-CAE applications requiring 3D graphics hardware acceleration support for complex visualization;
  • Support for running MPI, OpenMP, CUDA applications through access to HPC clusters, multicore processors, and NVIDIA graphics accelerators.
• Extended computing capabilities at the PaaS level through connecting hardware resources (HPC/BigData clusters, storage systems, graphic accelerator servers).
• Possibility of customization for a given application area due to integration of specialized calculation application packages and the easy way to add them. In particular, the following have been implemented:
  • in the field of MSS: OpenFOAM, SALOME, Paraview, etc;
  • in the field of Gas&Oil: tNavigator, Eclipse, Roxar, Tempest, etc.
• Operation via any thin client (including mobile devices) without any auxiliary software.
• Deployment on a server, computing farm, cloud (from the IaaS layer), in a Kubernetes cluster, or in dedicated cloud data center. The Kubernetes-based version also provides the opportunity to use different CRI container execution engines.

https://fanlight.ispras.ru

Cloud solutions deployment stories

The computing cluster based on Asperitas analyzes information flows in the Talisman social media analysis framework and supports other ISP RAS technologies (e.g. analyzing Android OS using Svace). The following projects were also implemented: a joint project with Huawei (large graphs analysis using big data processing) and the Tizen OS lifecycle support infrastructure that allows organizing joint development of OS components and automating regular build and testing of OS images. In addition, a number of projects is performed jointly with the Ministry of Science of Russian Federation.

The Fanlight platform was used in a number of joint projects for web laboratory deployment, including Russian Federal Nuclear Center of the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics, OOO RRS-Baltika, Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics (developing a technology for increasing and using efficiently the hydrocarbon raw materials resource potential of the Union State), ISP RAS Laboratory of Continuum Mechanics.

Developer/Participant

Information Systems