John Michael Lowe

Jetstream: A Cloud System Enabling Learning in Higher Education Communities

Jetstream is the first production cloud funded by the NSF for conducting general-purpose science and engineering research as well as an easy-to-use platform for education activities. Unlike many high-performance computing systems, Jetstream uses the interactive Atmosphere graphical user interface developed as part of the iPlant (now CyVerse) project and focuses on interactive use on uniprocessor or multiprocessor. This interface provides for a lower barrier of entry for use by educators, students, practicing scientists, and engineers. A key part of Jetstreams mission is to extend the reach of the NSFs eXtreme Digital (XD) program to a community of users who have not previously utilized NSF XD program resources, including those communities and institutions that traditionally lack significant cyberinfrastructure resources. One manner in which Jetstream eases this access is via virtual desktops facilitating use in education and research at small colleges and universities, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), Tribal colleges, and higher education institutions in states designated by the NSF as eligible for funding via the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). Jetstream entered into full production in September 2016 and during the first six months it has supported more than a dozen educational efforts across the United States. Here, we discuss how educators at institutions of higher education have been using Jetstream in the classroom and at student-focused workshops. Specifically, we explore success stories, difficulties encountered, and everything in between. We also discuss plans for increasing the use of cloud-based systems in higher education. A primary goal in this paper is to spark discussions between educators and information technologists on how to improve using cloud resources in education.

High Availability on Jetstream: Practices and Lessons Learned

Research computing has traditionally used high performance computing (HPC) clusters and has been a service not given to high availability without a doubling of computational and storage capacity. System maintenance such as security patching, firmware updates, and other system upgrades generally meant that the system would be unavailable for the duration of the work unless one has redundant HPC systems and storage. While efforts were often made to limit downtimes, when it became necessary, maintenance windows might be one to two hours or as much as an entire day. As the National Science Foundation (NSF) began funding non-traditional research systems, looking at ways to provide higher availability for researchers became one focus for service providers. One of the design elements of Jetstream was to have geographic dispersion to maximize availability. This was the first step in a number of design elements intended to make Jetstream exceed the NSFs availability requirements. We will examine the design steps employed, the components of the system and how the availability for each was considered in deployment, how maintenance is handled, and the lessons learned from the design and implementation of the Jetstream cloud.

Jetstream-Early operations performance, adoption, and impacts: Early Jetstream Performance and Results

Jetstream is a first of its kind system for the NSF — a distributed production cloud resource. We review the purpose for creating Jetstream, discuss Jetstreams key characteristics, describe our experiences from the first year of maintaining an OpenStack‐based cloud environment, and share some of the early scientific impacts achieved by Jetstream users. Jetstream offers a unique capability within the XSEDE‐supported US national cyberinfrastructure, delivering interactive virtual machines (VMs) via the Atmosphere interface. As a multi‐region deployment that operates as an integrated system, Jetstream is proving effective in supporting modes and disciplines of research traditionally underrepresented on larger XSEDE‐supported clusters and supercomputers. Already, Jetstream has been used to perform research and education in biology, biochemistry, atmospheric science, earth science, and computer science.