2026-03-12 –, Main Hall
This talk goes through the history of the Open OnDemand snap, a single package for running Open OnDemand on any Linux distribution.
The talk covers four sections:
- The Good; successes such as automatic backup/restore.
- The Bad; challenges like bundling Passenger, HTTPD, and NGINX together.
- The Ugly; implementing ad-hoc workarounds like a custom portal generator and custom Lua packages for administering Open OnDemand inside the snap runtime.
- What’s Next?
In the “What’s Next?” section, I'll present the Ubuntu HPC community's plans to integrate the snap into Charmed HPC to be the default user frontend. I will highlight blockers, struggles, hopeful contributions to Open OnDemand, and areas where we need community assistance.
Dive into the origins of the Open OnDemand snap, and learn how I managed to put together a semi-working Open OnDemand instance into a single package that can be installed and run on any Linux distribution that supports the snap package manager.
This talk will be delivered in four parts:
- The Good!
- The Bad :-|
- The Ugly :-(
- What’s Next?
In “The Good” section, I’ll discuss what went well when putting together the Open OnDemand snap, like having the ability to backup and restore your portal configuration, or managing Open OnDemand’s configuration from the command line using snap hooks. “The Bad” section will delve into the pain I experienced trying to bundle Phusion Passenger, Apache HTTPD, and NGINX in single package using sources only from Ubuntu’s package archives, and how I had to patch Passenger’s installation script to not autodetect PCRE2. “The Ugly” section will then mention some of the “hacks and wacks” that I had to implement to make Open OnDemand work nicely within the snap runtime such as creating my own portal generator in Go, and how I became an OpenIDC expert overnight to solve authentication issues before presenting a demo in front of 600+ engineers the next day.
At the end of the talk, I’ll detail what the Ubuntu HPC community’s future plans are for our work around Open OnDemand, and how we hope to integrate it into our open source project, Charmed HPC, to be the default frontend users interact with to use their cluster. I’ll highlight what our current blockers are, where we’ve struggled, what we hope to potentially contribute to Open OnDemand, and where we could use help from the existing Open OnDemand community.
Jason is an active open source contributor and software engineer focused on Ubuntu and High-Performance Computing. By day he works as the software engineering lead for the HPC team inside of Canonical's Cloud Engineering organization, and by night he serves as the leader of the Ubuntu High-Performance Computing community team. Together, they work on Charmed HPC, and new open source project from the Ubuntu community that's goal is to standardize the set up and lifecycle management of Slurm-based HPC clusters on Ubuntu.
As part of his position in the Ubuntu community, Jason likes to experiment with existing HPC technologies such as Open OnDemand and Slurm, and make them accessible to HPC newcomers using "micro hpc" clusters on their laptops.