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 an 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 and CloudStack

There are some overlaps between the CloudStack offering and our existing High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster environment.

	RCS HPC Cluster	CloudStack
CPU intensive workloads	Yes; 48 CPUs per node, 100's of nodes	No; 1-8 CPUs per VM
Memory intensive workloads	Yes; up to 2TB memory per node	No; up to 32GB memory per VM
High storage requirement workloads	Yes; shared multi-petabyte storage	No; up to 1TB per account
Data classification	Level 1 & 2 (ARC), Level 3 & 4 (MARC)	Level 1 & 2 only
Customized software requirements	Yes; use singularity containers	Yes
Custom OS configuration	No	Yes
Persistent software or services	No; time limited jobs only	Yes
Managed environment	Yes	No; self managed VMs only
Research support by analysts	Yes	Limited

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.