The new CMS online Cloud features now a complete easily scalable and redundant infrastructure. We implemented:

• RabbitMQ in cluster with replicated queues as described by RabbitMQ people in here;
• MySQL cluster after modifying minimally the definition of the tables needed by the different OpenStack services;
• Grizzly OpenStack services in active/active using the clusterware corosync/pacemaker and Round Robin aliases as an easy load balancer when needed (keystone, dashboard, APIs…). I want to thank here Florian Haas that gave me a guideline to develop the clusterware agent scripts for the different services.

This made our 1300 hypervisors (~13000 cores) cloud resilient to failures! The controlling infrastructure described briefly above scales nicely. I’ll post the link to the presentation after it is given.

On 15th of April Toni is going to Portland, where the nearest Openstack summit will take place. He will give detailed information about the architecture of CMSooooCloud, installation and configuration aspects and the big scale performance tests (about 1200 hypervisors under control of one OpenStack cloud manager).

At the same time I am going to talk about the virtualization and re-usage of resources in Bologna (Italy) at The High Energy Physics Unix Information Exchange. I will focus on benefits of applying the cloud approach in scientific environment. I will also cover aspect of network virtualization using OpenVSwitch.

We hope to meet some of you there.

You will also find information on the CMS online Cloud and other efforts at CERN to use the clusters when not fully used on the talk Offline usage of online farms presented on ALICE, ATLAS, CMS & LHCb joint workshop on DAQ@LHC

 Have fun.

It has, when full, 1300 hypervisor (~13000 physical cores).

Consider voting for the presentation under this link. You will need to register to the community first. Follow this link to register.

Thanks in advance for your support!

To test our OpenStack infrastructure we decided that our CPU should not be wasted and Wojciech picked up a project to help studying Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers. Help them too! Follow this link and help the folding@home project. We managed while testing the stability of our infrastructure to finalise more than 57000 Work Units only on a few weeks using more than 1000 hypervisors! Follow our progress in this link. Lately we have not been able to dedicate many CPU cycles… We are using the infrastructure ourselves… But we’ll try to continue helping…

This illustrates that one can donate CPU cycles to projects. Cloud infrastructure makes it easier. With an overlay one, as ours, your computers can be useful even if you don’t use them!