Red Hat Joins Forces with U.S. Department of Energy
Laboratories to Bridge the Gap Between High Performance Computing and Cloud
Environments
Collaboration to help set the stage for the arrival of exascale
supercomputers by establishing best practices for running next-generation HPC
workloads
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced it is collaborating with multiple U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) laboratories to bolster cloud-native standards and
practices in high-performance computing (HPC), including Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia
National Laboratories.
Adoption of HPC is expanding beyond traditional use cases. Advancements
in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, as well as
compute and data-driven analytics, is driving greater interest and need for
organizations to be able to run scalable containerized workloads on traditional
HPC infrastructure. According to industry analyst firm Hyperion Research,
roughly one-third of all HPC system revenue will be dedicated to AI-centric
systems by 2025, showing nearly 23% CAGR over the five year period, driven by the
influx of AI workloads. Additionally, nearly 20% of HPC users' HPC-enabled AI
workloads are currently being run in the cloud.
Red Hat is a leader in cloud-native
innovation across hybrid and multicloud environments, while
laboratories understand the needs and unique demands of massive-scale HPC
deployments. By establishing a common foundation of technology best practices,
this collaboration seeks to use standardized container platforms to link HPC
and cloud computing footprints, helping to fill potential gaps in building
cloud-friendly HPC applications while creating common usage patterns for
industry, enterprise and HPC deployments.
Together with the laboratories, Red Hat will focus on advancing four
specific areas that address current gaps and help lay the groundwork for
exascale computing, including standardization, scale, cloud-native application
development, and container storage. Examples of collaborative projects between
Red Hat and DOE laboratories includes:
Bringing standard container technologies to HPC
Red Hat and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at
Berkeley Lab recognize the importance of standard-based solutions in enabling
computing innovation, especially when technologies must span from the edge to
the cloud to HPC environments. From container security to scaling containerized
workloads, common, accepted practices help HPC sites to get the most from container
technologies. To better meet the unique requirements for large scale HPC
systems and pave the way for organizations to be able to take advantage of
containers in exascale computing, Red Hat and NERSC are collaborating
on enhancements to Podman, a daemonless container engine for
developing, managing and running container images on a Linux system, to
enable it to replace NERSC’s custom development runtime, Shifter.
Running Kubernetes at massive scale
Red Hat has been collaborating with Sandia National Laboratories on the SuperContainers project for
several years, working to make Linux containers and other building blocks of
cloud-native computing more readily accessible to supercomputing operations. In
this expanded collaboration, Red Hat and Sandia National Laboratories
intend to explore the deployment scenarios of
Kubernetes-based infrastructure at extreme scale, providing easier,
well-defined mechanisms for delivering containerized workloads to users.
Bridging traditional HPC jobs with cloud-native workloads
Red Hat and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are collaborating to bring
HPC job schedulers, such as Flux, to Kubernetes through a
standardized programmatic interface helping IT teams supporting supercomputing
operations to better manage traditional parallel workflows alongside
containerized jobs, including how this mix of technologies operates with
low-level hardware devices, like accelerators or high-speed networks.
Reimagining storage for containers
For containers to be used effectively across both HPC and commercial cloud
resources, a set of standard interfaces is needed in order to manage various
container image formats and for providing access to distributed file systems.
Red Hat and the three DOE National Laboratories aim to define the mechanisms by
which container images can be migrated from and deployed with other container
engines, allowing users to freely move their applications across
popular container runtime platforms, as well as create mechanisms that
allow containers to use distributed file systems as persistent storage.
Through the collaboration and Red Hat's experience supporting some
of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, HPC sites will be able to abstract
the immense complexities their environments can present, benefiting the range
of United States exascale machines being deployed by DOE.
Supporting Quotes
Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Red
Hat
“The HPC community has served as the proving ground for
compute-intensive applications, embracing containers early on to help deal with
a new set of scientific challenges and problems. That led to the lack of
standardization across various HPC sites creating barriers to building and
deploying containerized applications that can effectively span large-scale HPC,
commercial and cloud environments, while also taking advantage of emerging
hardware accelerators. Through our collaboration with leading laboratories, we
are working to remove these barriers, opening the door to liberating
next-generation HPC workloads.”
Earl Joseph, Ph.D., chief executive officer, Hyperion Research
“High performance computing infrastructure must adapt to the
requirements of today's heterogeneous workloads, including workloads that use
containers. Red Hat’s partnership with the DOE labs is designed to allow the
new generation of HPC applications to run in containers at exascale while
utilizing distributed file system storage, providing a strong example of
collaboration between industry and research leaders."
Shane Canon, senior engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
“The collaboration with the Podman community and Red Hat engineers is
helping us to explore and co-develop enhancements that will allow Podman to
scale and perform for the largest HPC workloads. We have already demonstrated
this across 512 GPU nodes on Perlmutter. NERSC sees a convergence of HPC and
cloud-native workloads, and Podman can be an important tool in helping to
bridge between these two worlds.”
Bronis R. de Supinski, chief technology officer, Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory
“High performance computing infrastructure is becoming more diverse and
is increasingly being used to run non-traditional HPC workflows. We need to
provide mechanisms for scheduling various types of workflows and expect
container orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift to be a
significant part of the software ecosystem effectively contributing to the
convergence of the HPC and cloud realms.”
Andrew J. Younge, Ph.D., R&D manager and computer scientist, Sandia
National Laboratories
“Sandia and the DOE are seeing an increased need to support more diverse
HPC workloads, beyond traditional batch-based modeling and simulation codes.
This requires us to find new and innovative ways to enabling services, tasks,
and data persistence models together within tight coordination with current
simulation capabilities. Furthermore, workload portability remains an important
consideration where containers are now a key component to our code deployment
strategy. Sandia’s collaboration with Red Hat on Podman and Kubernetes-based
OpenShift enables us to investigate approaches for delivering modeling and
simulation capabilities as a service to Sandia’s designer and analyst
communities.”
Source: Red Hat media announcement