Ceph in HPC Environments at SC17

Overview

Individuals from MSI, RedHat Inc., Indiana University (Jetstream), Laureate Institute for Brain Research, and Monash University came together at SC17: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis on Tuesday, November 14, 2017 in Denver, Colorado to share their experiences with Ceph in HPC Environments.

This "Birds of a Feather (BoF)" meeting brought together Ceph developers and systems administers to share their experience working with Ceph and to discuss how it can be used to address many of the challenges that we now associate with Big Data and data intensive research. The format for this BoF was a series of six lightning talks. Each talk was about 6 minutes, followed by questions. Researchers, developers, and administrators are welcome to come and participate in this session and to share and learn about Ceph in the wild.

 

 

 

Speakers and Panel Members

Ben Lynch, Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, University of Minnesota

  • Talk Title:  Introduction and Overview of Ceph at MSI
  • Bio Sketch: For his Ph.D. thesis, Ben developed computational methods used for thermochemistry and thermochemical kinetics simulations. At MSI, he leads a variety of projects in software development and new technology deployment. Ben has led Ceph deployments for object and block storage at MSI.

 

Blair Bethwaite, Monash University

  • Talk Title:  Ceph at Monash University

  • Bio Sketch: Blair has worked in distributed computing at Monash University for over ten years, leading Monash's use of OpenStack in research computing for the last five. Team lead, architect, admin, user, researcher and occasional hacker - Blair's unique (if slightly schizophrenic) perspective has helped guide the evolution of the research computing engine central to Monash's 21st Century Microscope vision.

Brady Deetz, Head of IT at Laureate Institute for Brain Research

  • Talk Title: Year 2 with Petascale CephFS

  • Bio Sketch: Brady Deetz is the head of IT for the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, a clinical neuroscience research institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At LIBR he is responsible for research computing and data storage in support of multidisciplinary research programs in neuroimaging, behavioral health, and biochemical measures. Key cyberinfrastructure resources include petascale tape storage; a petascale disk (Ceph) resource, and local compute servers.

Mike Lowe, Indiana University, Jetstream

Rhian Resnick, Florida Atlantic University

  • Talk Title: Ceph at Florida Atlantic University

  • Bio Sketch: Rhian (Ryan) Resnick holds a MS in Computer Information Systems from Florida Institute of Technology. He currently serves as the Assistant Director of Research Computing and Middleware and is an Adjunct Professor teaching computer forensics and programing at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). He is currently responsible for architecture and design of FAU’s research computing cluster along with evangelization of FAU’s research computing capabilities. His team is responsible for the University’s authentication systems and Research Computing Resources including the a 600 TB Ceph deployment with cephfs and remote block device implementations.      

Douglas Fuller, Red Hat, Inc.

  • Talk Title:  What’s New in Ceph Luminous

  • Bio Sketch: Douglas Fuller has been a Ceph engineer at Red Hat, Inc. since 2015. Prior to joining Red Hat, Doug worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge Leadership Computing facility, working on design and implementation of some of the world’s largest and fastest scalable data storage systems. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Iowa State University, studying programming models and languages for high performance computing.

Patrick Donnelly, Red Hat, Inc.

  • Talk Title:  Latest Developments in CephFS

  • Bio Sketch: Patrick Donnelly is a software engineer at Red Hat, Inc. currently working on the Ceph distributed file system. In 2016 he completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Notre Dame with a dissertation on the topic of file transfer management in active storage cluster file systems.