SLATE blog

Varnish is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. It’s an alternative to squid, the web caching service that the ATLAS community is familiar with. Slate recently released two Varnish charts, v4a and v4cvmfs. The former creates a Varnish instance that is configured to proxy ATLAS Frontier requests while the latter creates a Varnish instance that is configured to proxy CVMFS requests (CMS, ATLAS, and any CVMFS repository available on Stratum One servers).

Note: This blog post has been updated in January 2023 after moving the perfsonar-checker app from development to production.

PerfSONAR is a popular tool to measure network bandwidth and latency between between hosts in a network. We’ve built an application that can be easily deployed on a SLATE cluster to check connectivity against production endpoints we operate on the SLATE platform. This should be a handy tool that cluster administrators can use to check out a newly installed cluster.

The SLATE Team is excited to announce the migration of Faucet from the incubator catalog to the stable catalog on the SLATE Portal.

The SLATE API & Client version 1.0.36 includes improvements to the Kubernetes NGINX Ingress Controller, added support for OpenTelemetry, and more.

The team has been busy preparing SLATE for Kubernetes (K8s) v1.24.x and today we are happy to announce that this work is now live. As cluster administrators there are several upgrade tasks you must perform to continue using SLATE with this new version of K8s.

After the Let’s Encrypt root certificate expired at the end of September 2021, a few people are still experiencing a certificate expired warning on our websites. We have updated our websites with the current certificate; however, some users may need to update the certificate on their computers. Specifically, we have seen this issue with Mac OS.

Open OnDemand is a web application enabling easy access to high-performance computing resources. Open OnDemand, through a plugin system, provides many different ways to interact with these resources. Most simply, OnDemand can launch a shell to remote resources in one’s web browser. Additionally, OnDemand can provide several ways of submitting batch jobs and launching interactive computing sessions. It is also able to serve as a portal to computationally expensive software running on remote HPC nodes. For example, users can launch remote Jupyter Notebooks or Matlab instances.

The SLATE platform provides a simple way to deploy this application with a batch job scheduler in a containerized environment, with remote desktop and shell access to any desired backend compute resources.