Your own personal supercomputer? Within 15 minutes? Are you crazy?

I promise you that the answer is no. What if you could have a supercomputing system that ships with all the necessary components – storage, networking, identity, orchestration, and more – wherever you want it? And the system could easily be deployed on your laptop, home lab, or public/private/hybrid in a short amount of time? The barrier between general purpose cloud computing and traditional high-performance computing (HPC) is coming down with the increasing need for HPC systems to be capable of supporting complex, heterogeneous workloads, and the need for cloud systems to be more efficient for resource intensive tasks such as training large-language AI models on a massive, distributed datasets. Rather than painstakingly evaluating each cloud-based or on-premise HPC platform and the complementary tools offered by each vendor, what if you could just use a single, open source project that works both in the cloud and on-premises? And that project holds true to the straight-forward 15 minute deployment time promise? Well… there is such an open source project...

In this talk, you will learn about Charmed HPC, an open source HPC infrastructure stack being developed by the Ubuntu HPC community team. We will explore how all the services that compose Charmed HPC are integrated together using the Juju orchestration engine, and how common life-cycle events such as compute node registration and filesystem provisioning are automatically handled by Charmed HPC. You will also learn how Charmed HPC enables you to take control of where your supercomputing system is deployed and how you can leverage multiple cloud platforms such as OpenStack, LXD, GCP, AWS, or Azure... within 15 minutes!

At the end of the talk, we will demo a development preview of Charmed HPC showcasing the features we are actively developing. For example, we will demo the new CephFS storage provider and show Open OnDemand in action as the web-based user interface for our test cluster. Lastly, we will outline our current roadmap for Charmed HPC’s development - such as adding both an observability and identity + access management platform - and opportunities for how the open source community can get involved with the Ubuntu HPC community team.

At the 2022 Ubuntu Summit, a realization was made. There were many groups of individuals working independently on making Ubuntu, traditionally unrepresented in the supercomputing ecosystem, a better distribution for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Some of us were working on packaging common HPC applications for Ubuntu, some were developing Juju operators for the Slurm workload manager, and others were working on writing comprehensive documentation. Our realization was that rather than working independently on our overlapping challenges, we should instead work together as a community team within the Ubuntu project!

In this talk, you will learn how our chance meeting at the 2022 Ubuntu Summit lead to the creation of the Ubuntu HPC community team. We will discuss the work that we needed to do to become an official Ubuntu community team, steps we needed to take to set up a successful community team, and how we work together as a globally distributed team to develop Charmed HPC, an open source HPC infrastructure stack for Ubuntu. We will also discuss how the Ubuntu HPC community can interact with other open source communities, and how we can create opportunities for new individuals to become involved with the open source HPC ecosystem. Lastly we will discuss current challenges that we are having such as onboarding new community contributors and supporting our community of users, and come up with potential strategies to help address these challenges.