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 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 16GB 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 |
| 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.
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.