Carleton University builds Research Cloud with Ubuntu OpenStack on IBM

The Canonical has announced completion of its work with Carleton University of Ottawa, to build a Research Cloud using Ubuntu OpenStack on top of IBM power servers. This cloud system will provide rapid, self servicing computation resources to handle complex scientific inquiries. These resources will be available to researchers inside university campus and other innovative projects running in collaboration with the university.

Carleton University was looking for a cloud environment to deploy on their hybrid system powered by IBM Power and other x86 based servers. Soon they found that OpenStack can serve their purpose and joined with Canonical to deploy OpenStack.

They also wanted a solution that included support for the robust POWER Architecture, so researchers could opt for the faster processing power available from the symmetric multi-processing and wider memory bandwidth available from POWER. Multi-platform support was important since commercial software packages used by researchers run on various platforms. So, an OpenStack environment that could manage a heterogeneous environment across POWER and x86 platforms was their ideal goal.

Carleton University was pleased to discover that Canonical now offered OpenStack, in addition to Ubuntu, MAAS, and Juju for the POWER platform. Canonical, working with IBM, provided Canonical Cloud Tools: Ubuntu, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with OpenStack Liberty, MAAS and Juju to create a single Ubuntu OpenStack deployment on IBM Power Systems and x86 servers in a hybrid cloud. Using Juju to deploy all OpenStack services across POWER8 and x86 based servers, the university then used Canonical’s MAAS to deploy to bare metal, spinning up the new cloud in matter of minutes.

You can read complete article on collaboration of Carleton University and Canonical in a blog post published on Ubuntu Insights.