PASC ’24 Minisymposium – Challenges and Opportunities in Running Kubernetes Workloads on HPC
Today, during the MS6C – European Perspective on Converged HPC and Cloud Hardware & Software Architectures session chaired by Tiziano Müller (HPE), Antony Chazapis (FORTH) presented on the topic of Challenges and Opportunities in Running Kubernetes Workloads on HPC. We were in good company with presentations from other EU projects funded under the Horizon Europe call – Open source for cloud-based services, each providing a unique perspective on the challenges of integrating both Cloud and HPC. In this Minisymposium the discussion focused on the results, as well as the potential impact of our respective projects and our proposed architectures on the HPC landscape.
Description:
Cloud and HPC increasingly converge in hardware platform capabilities and specifications, nevertheless still largely differ in the software stack and how it manages available resources. The HPC world typically favors Slurm for job scheduling, whereas Cloud deployments rely on Kubernetes to orchestrate container instances across nodes. Running hybrid workloads is possible by using bridging mechanisms that submit jobs from one environment to the other. However, such solutions require costly data movements, while operating within the constraints set by each setup’s network and access policies. In this presentation, we introduce an container-based approach design that enables running unmodified Kubernetes workloads directly on HPC systems, by having users deploy their own private Kubernetes mini Cloud, which internally converts container lifecycle management commands to use the HPC system-level Slurm infrastructure for scheduling and Singularity/Apptainer as the container runtime. We consider this approach to be practical for deployment in HPC centers, as it requires minimal pre configuration and retains existing resource management and accounting policies.
Climate, Weather, and Earth Sciences, Engineering, Computational Methods and Applied Mathematics
Authors:
Antony Chazapis (FORTH), Fotis Nikolaidis (SuperDuperDB), Manolis Marazakis (FORTH), Angelos Bilas (FORTH, University of Crete)
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