SLATE blog

The Chameleon testbed is an OpenStack-based testbed for running a wide variety of experiments.

This blog post will demonstrate how to run a SLATE cluster on the Chameleon testbed, with MetalLB functionality enabled. Normally, MetalLB is not able to run on Chameleon, due to Chameleon’s inability to directly assign a public IP address to an instance. However, by following this guide, MetalLB can still can be deployed, but restricted to the experimental plane. This gives researchers testing on Chameleon the ability to have a much more functional test environment.

This post is intended as an optional follow-up to the “SLATE On Chameleon” blog post. If you have not read this initial post, do so, as it is a prerequisite to this one. It will go through a simpler cluster install on Chameleon, and help familiarize you with the testbed.

Chameleon is an OpenStack-based research platform for provisioning compute and networking resources.

CloudLab is a research platform for provisioning compute and networking resources. It can be leveraged to provide the resources upon which a SLATE cluster can run. This post will outline the process of setting up this SLATE cluster. More information about CloudLab can be found here.

The SLATE platform provides a powerful, simple way to deploy a large variety of applications. In this blog post, we will demonstrate how SLATE can be leveraged to quickly deploy a monitoring solution for Internet2 network infrastructure. Collected metrics regarding network traffic through monitored nodes will be sent to a database at Indiana University’s Global Research Network Operations Center (GlobalNOC). Our monitoring solution will use Telegraf to monitor a group of hosts with the Simple Network Management Protocol, usually referred to as SNMP. More information about SNMP can be found here. In addition, metrics can also be sent to a separate InfluxDB database.

A commonly requested feature for SLATE has been to add persistent volumes. We are now introducing persistent volumes for the SLATE platform. Adding a persient volume is easy and can be used with any application that accepts persistent volumes in their configuration.

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 rapidly deploy this application in a containerized environment, complete with integration into an existing LDAP user directory.