Available Infrastructure for the ChRIS Project

Introduction

We need to provide two deployments of CUBE:

• private: BCH-only, PHI-allowed
• public: anyone can use

To deploy CUBE, are are concerned about 3 components:

• compute resource
• storage
• location of CUBE (backend)

For simplification, in this article we will not consider where the compute resource will be located since it can typically be colocated with CUBE.

Available Infrastructure

Name	Owner	Physical Location	Advantages	Disadvantages	Work Needed
fnndsc.childrens.harvard.edu	BCH Research Computing (RC)	BCH	easy	low resources	none
cube-next.tch.harvard.edu	FNNDSC	Landmark Center	easy	slow	none
FNNDSC Galena	FNNDSC	Landmark Center	physical access, root access	Nodes vary greatly in capacity, there are only a few "good" nodes which are multi-purpose	run CUBE on k8s
bch-mghpcc	MGHPCC	MGHPCC at Holyoke	50TB of free space	must use SLURM, Singularity, NFS; no PHI; not exposed to public	Run CUBE using Singularity
NERC OpenStack Compute	NERC	MGHPCC at Holyoke	outside of BCH network	Ask NERC about quotas, must manage VMs ourselves	good-to-go
NERC OpenStack Storage	NERC	MGHPCC at Holyoke	outside of BCH network; professionally operated Swift storage is performant+durable	Ask NERC about quotas	good-to-go
NERC OpenShift	NERC	MGHPCC at Holyoke	outside of BCH network; Kubernetes	Ask NERC about quotas	run CUBE on k8s

CUBE Deployment Configurations

CUBE Location	Storage Location	CUBE<-->Storage Connection	Size	Storage Reliability	Performance
fnndsc.childrens.harvard.edu	fnndsc.childrens.harvard.edu	host	200GB	⭐	⭐⭐⭐
cube-next.tch.harvard.edu	cube-next.tch.harvard.edu	host	1TB	⭐	⭐
FNNDSC galena	BCH rc-nfs	in-network	10TB	⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐
NERC OpenShift	mghpcc-bch	WWW SSH tunnel ?[1]	50TB	⭐⭐ [2]	⭐
mghpcc-bch ?[1]	mghpcc-bch	in-network	50TB	⭐⭐ [2]	⭐⭐⭐
NERC OpenStack Compute	NERC OpenStack Swift	in-network	2TB?	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
NERC OpenShift	NERC OpenShift NooBaa? [3]	in-network	100GB?	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
NERC OpenShift	NERC OpenShift Volume	in-network	100GB?	⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐
NERC OpenShift	NERC OpenStack Swift	WWW	2TB?	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐

Questions

1. May we open ports on bch-mghpcc? May they be public-facing, or BCH-only?
2. What is the storage deployment and policy of bch-mghpcc? (RAID? NFS? Backup frequency? Backup accessibility?)
3. Does NERC OpenShift support Noobaa object storage?

Conditional Suggestions

1. If bch-mghpcc allows us to open ports publicly (or reverse-proxy) and we can get it to work without SSH tunneling bottleneck, then it is our best choice for public CUBE, because of the size of the free storage.
2. If NERC OpenShift offers NooBaa object storage and is generous with quotas, it would be our best choice for public CUBE, because of Kubernetes and efficiency.
3. If NERC OpenStack is generous with its quotas, it would be a good place to host our public CUBE.