By the summit, the NeCTAR Research Cloud will have been operating in production for more than a year.
A federated Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud for use in any discipline across the Australian research community has provided virtual machines and object storage to researchers around the country. Within the next eight months, it will expand to 30,000 cores over 8 sites distributed over an area comparable to the USA, using OpenStack Compute Cells.
Using this as a platform, the sector is moving to build an array of services and software solutions to enhance research ability and collaboration. This presentation builds on the existing case study (http://www.openstack.org/user-stories/nectar/collaborative-research/) to introducing the design, and address the challenges encountered in operating a multi-site cloud for researchers from Archaeology to Wine.
For the technical: we'll dive into cells, list real hardware specifications, talk about HA, puppet, and more For the manager: ask us about how few people we need to run a cloud of this scale, and how we build up the stack.
