Kubernetes: The New Research Platform

Academic research institutions are at a precipice. They have historically been constrained to supporting classic “job” style workloads. With the growth of new workflow practices such as streaming data, science gateways, and more “dynamic” research using lambda-like functions, they must now support a variety of workloads.

In this talk, Lindsey and Bob will discuss some difficulties faced by academic institutions and how Kubernetes offers an extensible solution to support the future of research. They will present a selection of projects currently benefiting from Kubernetes enabled tools, like Argo, Kubeflow, and kube-batch. These workflows will be demonstrated using specific examples from two large research institutions: Compute Canada, Canada’s national computation research consortium and the University of Michigan, one of the largest public Universities in the United States.

Transcript

2. Kubernetes the New Research Platform Bob Killen Lindsey Tulloch University of Michigan Brock University
3. $ whoami - Lindsey Lindsey Tulloch Undergraduate Student at Brock University Github: @onyiny-ang Twitter: @9jaLindsey
4. $ whoami - Bob Bob Killen rkillen@umich.edu Senior Research Cloud Administrator CNCF Ambassador Github: @mrbobbytables Twitter: @mrbobbytables
5. Kubernetes the New Research Platform Bob Killen Lindsey Tulloch University of Michigan Brock University
6. ...or a tale of two Research Institutions.
7. Why? • Increased use of containers...everywhere. • Moving away from strict “job” style workflows. • Adoption of data-streaming and in-flight processing. • Greater use of interactive Science Gateways. • Dependence on other more persistent services. • Increasing demand for reproducibility. R. Banerjee et. all - A graph theoretic framework for representation, exploration and analysis on computed states of physical systems
8. Why Kubernetes? • Kubernetes has become the standard for container orchestration. • Extremely easy to extend, augment, and integrate with other systems. • If it works on Kubernetes, it’ll work “anywhere”. • No vendor lock-in. • Very large, active development community. • Declarative nature aids in improving reproducibility.
9. • Final Research Project in CS(1 credit)
10. • Final Research Project in CS(1 credit) • Bioinformatics
11. • Final Research Project in CS(1 credit) • Bioinformatics • Kubernetes
12. • Final Research Project in CS(1 credit) • Bioinformatics • Kubernetes • Bioinformatics on Kubernetes!
13. • Final Research Project in CS(1 credit) • Bioinformatics • Kubernetes • Bioinformatics on Kubernetes!
14. • Final Research Project in CS(1 credit) • Bioinformatics • Kubernetes • Bioinformatics on Kubernetes! • on Compute Canada?
15. Compute Canada Regional and Government Partners
17. Compute Canada • Not-for-profit corporation • Membership includes most of Canada’s major research universities • All Canadian faculty members have access to Compute Canada systems and can sponsor others: - students - postdocs - external collaborators • No fee for Canadian university faculty • Reduced fee for federal laboratories and not-for-profit orgs
18. Compute Canada • Compute and storage resources, data centres • Team of ~200 experts in utilization of advanced research computing • 100s of research software packages • Cloud compute and storage (openstack, owncloud) • 5-10 Data Centres • 300,000 cores • 12 Pflops, 50+ PB
19. Compute Canada Researchers drive innovation • The CC user base is broadening, bringing a broader set of needs. • Tremendous interest in services enabling Research Data Management (RDM)
20. • No restrictions on researchers ≠ admin privileges • ~200 experts ≠ ~200 Kubernetes experts • ≠ 1 Kubernetes expert. . . • How is this going to work????? Researchers drive innovation Back to Salmon
21. ATLAS Collaboration
22. ATLAS Collaboration What is ATLAS? - located on the Large Hadron Collider ring - detects and records the products of proton collisions in the LHC - The LHC and the ATLAS detector together form the most powerful microscope ever built - allow scientists to explore: - space and time - fundamental laws of nature
23. ATLAS Collaboration NBD
24. ATLAS Collaboration • ATLAS produces several peta-bytes of data/year • Tier 2 computing centers perform final analyses (Canadian Universities like UVic) UVic-ATLAS group: - 25 scientists (students, research associates, technicians, computer experts, engineers and physics professors)
25. ATLAS + Kubernetes Where does Kubernetes fit in?
26. Compute Canada and CERN • Use Kubernetes as a batch system • Based on SLC6 containers and CVMFS-csi driver • Proxy passed through K8s secret • Still room for evolution, eg. allow arbitrary container/options execution, maybe split I/O in 1-core container, improve usage of infrastructure • Tested at scale for some weeks thanks to CERN IT & Ricardo Rocha FaHiu Lin, Mandy Yang
27. Compute Canada and CERN • Create your own cluster with certain number of nodes (=VMs) • Kubernetes orchestrates pods (=containers) on top • Need custom scheduling • Need to improve/automate node management with infrastructure people − Lost half the nodes during the exercise FaHiu Lin Thanks to Danika MacDonell With default K8s Scheduler (round robin load balance) With policy tuning to pack nodes
28. Salmon on Kubernetes • Arbutus Cloud Project Access ◦ Openstack ◦ Maximum Resource Allocation ▪ 5 Instances, 16 VCPUs, 36GB RAM, 5 Volumes, 70GB Volume Storage ▪ 5 Floating IPs, 6 Security Groups • Deploy Kubernetes with Kubespray, Terraform and Ansible • Containerize the Salmon Algorithm • Create Argo workflow
29. Salmon runs
30. Salmon Results
31. Future of Kubernetes at CC • Interest from some staff • CERN seems to be driving Kubernetes innovation • Other researchers? ◦ Learning curve is steep and time is precious (installing Kubernetes on bare metal just to run your workflow is probably not worth it) ◦ Lack of expertise with essential tools (yaml, docker, github)
32. University of Michigan • 19 school and colleges • 45,000 students • 8,000 faculty • Largest Public Research Institution within the U.S. • 1.48 billion in annual research expenditures.
33. ARC-TS • Advanced Research Computing and Technology Services. • Streamline the Research Experience. • Manage all computational Research Needs. • Provide infrastructure and architecture consultation services.
34. ARC-TS • Primary Shared HPC Cluster - 27,000 cores. • Secondary restricted data HPC Cluster. • Additional clusters with ARM, POWER architectures. • Data Science (HADOOP + Spark) • On-prem virtualization services • Cloud Services.
35. ARC-TS Needs • Original adoption of Kubernetes spurred by internal needs to easily host and manage internal services. ◦ High availability ▪ Hosting artifacts and patch mirrors ▪ Source repositories ▪ Build Systems ◦ Minimal overhead ◦ Logging & Metrics
38. A few services..
39. #1 Requested Service.
40. Demand shifting from JupyterHub to Kubeflow.
41. Why Kubeflow? • Chainer Training • Hyperparameter Tuning (Katib) • Istio Integration (for TF Serving) • Jupyter Notebooks • ModelDB • ksonnet • MPI Training • MXNet Training • Pipelines • PyTorch Training • Seldon Serving • NVIDIA TensorRT Inference Server • TensorFlow Serving • TensorFlow Batch Predict • TensorFlow Training (TFJob) • PyTorch Serving
42. The New Research Workflow Sculley et al. - Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems
43. Challenges • Difficult to integrate with classic multi-user posix infrastructure. ◦ Translating API level identity to posix identity. • Installation on-prem/bare-metal is still challenging. • No “native” concept of job queue or wall time. ◦ Up to higher level components to extend and add that functionality. • Scheduler generally not as expressive as common HPC workload managers such as Slurm or Torque/MOAB.
44. Current User Distribution • General Users - 70% - Want a consumable endpoint. • Intermediate users - 20% - Want to be able to update their own deployment (Git) and consume results. • Advanced users - 10% - Want direct Kubernetes Access.
45. Future @ UofM • Move to Bare Metal. • Improve integration with institutional infrastructure. • Investigate Hybrid HPC & Kubernetes. ◦ Sylabs SLURM Operator ◦ IBM LSF Operator • Improved Kubernetes Native HPC ◦ Kube-batch ◦ Volcano
46. Future @ UofM Outreach and training for both Faculty and Students.
47. Expected User Distribution General Users - 70% 30% Intermediate - 20% 40% Advanced - 10% 30% Demand for direct access growing with continued education.
48. Expected User Distribution General Users - 70% 30% Intermediate - 20% 40% Advanced - 10% 30% Demand for direct access growing with continued education.
49. Recap: Kubernetes is great. Lots of applications to facilitate research workflows. Growing demand for research that would benefit from Kubernetes.
50. Suggestions for increasing Kubernetes Adoption
51. Providers • Offer Kubernetes for people to consume • Get involved with the Kube community • Learn as much as you can • Provide outreach to researchers and anyone that might need to be ramped up
52. Researchers • Engage with research institutions • Get involved with the Kube community • Learn as much as you can • Provide outreach to researchers and anyone that might need to be ramped up
53. Useful Links • CNCF Academic Mailing List • CNCF Academic Slack (#academia) • Batch Jobs Channel (#kubernetes-batch-jobs) • Kubernetes Big Data User Group • Kubernetes Machine Learning Working Group
54. Credits and Thanks • ATLAS images were sourced from the CERN document server: https://cds.cern.ch/ • VISPA website: https://www.uvic.ca/science/physics/vispa/research/projects/atlas/ • Compute Canada usage information: https://www.computecanada.ca