Fanlight

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