CloudStack

Apache CloudStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that allows researchers to quickly deploy virtual machines for research projects. This service is part of Research Computing Services' Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) and is free for all University of Calgary researchers and principal investigators.

Use cases

CloudStack allows you to create virtual machines for a wide range of workloads and use cases, including:

• Running a internal or public facing web site
• Running a database
• Experiment with new software tools
• Test out the latest release of a software package

Please note that CloudStack is offered as a research environment and is supported as such. For workloads that demand high availability and high uptime, this may not be the appropriate choice. Researchers are solely responsible for maintaining any VMs they deploy. The expectation is that the owners of the VMs will be patching and doing other maintenance work on a regular basis. We will be more than happy to provide guidance on this process.

Contact us at support@hpc.ucalgary.ca for details.

Differences between RCS HPC cluster and CloudStack

There are some overlaps between the CloudStack offering and our existing HPC environment.

	CloudStack	RCS HPC
CPU / memory intensive workloads	1-8 CPUs per VM	48 CPUs per node, 100's of nodes
Storage availability	<1000GB per account	Shared petabyte scale storage available
Support data classification	Level 1 & 2 only	Level 1 & 2 (ARC), Level 3 & 4 (MARC)
Customized software requirements	Yes	Use singularity containers
Persistent software or services	Yes	No; time limited jobs only
Managed environment	No	Yes
Research support by analysts	Limited	Yes

Not sure if you need a virtual machine or a compute cluster? Is this the "Cloud"? Contact us at support@hpc.ucalgary.ca and we will assist you in using this service to support your research goals.

Getting access to CloudStack

If you are a researcher or principal investigator, please review our CloudStack End User Agreement and then request a CloudStack account through Service Now.

Once your account is ready, please refer to the CloudStack User Guide for details on using CloudStack.

Note

CloudStack is a research environment and is supported as such.

Researchers have a great degree of freedom in how they use CloudStack and they are solely responsible for maintaining any VMs they deploy. The expectation is that the owners of the VMs will be patching and doing other maintenance work on a regular basis. We will be more than happy to provide guidance on this process. Contact us at support@hpc.ucalgary.ca for details.