Data Centre Deployment

This page describes the installation of SCAPE platform in a High Performance Computation centre. The hardware platform is described here.

During the reporting period UVT endeavoured in developing tools oriented at the integration of SCAPE components with Cloud Computing related technologies and providing robust services to clients. Considering this the UVT team integrated and extended specialized tools like a Node Deployment system (Cobbler) and a Configuration Management system (Puppet), offering in this way features for automated cluster provisioning and platform deployment. Some of the main capabilities of the integration resume to:

• Dynamic allocation of nodes: systems can be added and removed from the management of the node deployment and configuration management systems on the fly, both on bare-bones computing hardware and on virtualized computing resources
• On the fly software deployment using the customized Configuration Management System: it allows the evolution of SCAPE software packages by providing “high-level” recipes describing the tools and relations between them. It enables dynamic allocation of SCAPE components to computing resources with minimal human intervention, providing, in this way, a more deterministic software deployment process. It ensures that software is deployed as expected by the developers, meeting all required expectations.
• Monitoring/Quality measures: the integrated Puppet Configuration Management system natively provides capabilities for integration with and deployment of the Nagios monitoring solution. This allows operators/administrators to provide a better QoS.
  

It has to be noted that this Task is tightly coupled with Task 5, as most of the development and integration efforts are set to be extended in the context of Cloud Enable execution, ensuring a uniform approach for deployment and execution. This task is on-going.