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IBM Cloud & HelixNebula

Ezra Silvera (ezra@il.ibm.com)

IBM Research

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IBM cloud & HelixNebula – perfect alignment

• Cloud is one of the main strategic directions in IBM

– Including cognitive, analytics, and more

• Large number of relevant solutions and technologies

• Intensive on-going development and research towards new capabilities

• Hybrid cloud is a key component in the existing and future cloud strategy

Fully aligned with the HelixNebula initiative

On-Premises IT

Public

Dedicated and LocalPrivate

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Our approach for HelixNebula

• Build the base solution on top of existing proven IBM technologies

– Important in order to achieve a solid and stable solution

• Focus the project on HNSciCloud unique requirements

– Explore innovative ways to extend existing solutions and bridging technology gaps

– Push back innovations to IBM technologies Make available to the market

• Focus on open technologies and public available services

– Strong contributor to open communities (e.g., OpenStack, Docker, Kubernets, etc..)

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Build on top of IBM SoftLayer IaaS

• Over 45 global cloud centers connected by secure, high-speed network

– enable high bandwidth integration to GEANT

• Variety of choices for flexibility and control (BM, VM, etc..)

– Match special requirements for computation, isolation, networking, etc..

– Targeting HPC workloads requirements

• Open APIs with single pane customer portal

• Excellent support for Hybrid cloud setups

– Support secure integration to on-premises: Single Sign-On (SSO) Services using the SAML

– Can build a custom solution on top of SL Bare-Metal (e.g., OpenStack, VMWare, etc.)

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Leveraging IBM containers capabilities

• Container trend is increasing dramatically

• We see usage of containers across many areas

• IBM container service

• Fully managed hosted platform

• Including: Integrated logging, monitoring, load balancing,

registry and auto-scaling

• Advanced security features

• Built using Docker technology and support for Docker APIs

IBM CONTAINERS

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Leveraging IBM containers capabilities (Cont.)

• Take advantage of the deep knowledge gained in building container service

• Explore the best fit of containers to HPC workloads

• Network capabilities, isolation model, storage connectivity, etc.

• Build on top of different server types to match special needs

• Bare-Metal, VMs, etc..

• Support different management frameworks (Kubernetes, etc..)

• According to the specific workload need E.g., deploy complex services, self-healing, etc..

Docker Swarm

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Data Access using the IBM Spectrum scale

• Provides a high performance parallel and distributed filesystem,

• Supports standard POSIX file system interface

• Has seamless capacity and performance scaling

• Able to cache data on demand asynchronously (using AFM)

– The cashing mechanism is highly configurable through policy engine and policies

• Well suited for handling very large datasets

– With a lot of concurrent accesses for a large number of client servers.

Storage Resource Pools

Global Namespace

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Data Access using the IBM Spectrum scale (Cont.)

• AFM (Active File Management) - enables sharing of data

across clusters

– A single name space view across sites around the world

– Namespace are truly global by automatically managing asynchronous

replication of data

– Name space maintenance occurs asynchronously applications can

continue operating without being constrained by network bandwidth.

GPFS

GPFS

GPFS

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The IBM HelixNebula team

• Build a team around the special challenges of HelixNebula

• Take advantage of the vast knowledge and expertise across the company

• Pulling into the team contributors from all relevant sections

– IBM Research and Development, IBM Cloud, IBM Systems, IBM Global Services, and more

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Thank You

ezra@il.ibm.com