Univa Open Sources Project Tortuga to Accelerate the Migration of Enterprise HPC Workloads to the Cloud

Univa, a leading innovator in on-premise and hybrid cloud workload management solutions for enterprise HPC customers, announced the contribution of its Navops Launch (née Unicloud) product to the open source community as Project Tortuga under an Apache 2.0 license to help proliferate the transition of enterprise HPC workloads to the cloud.

"Having access to more software that applies to a broad set of applications like high performance computing is key to making the transition to the cloud successful," said William Fellows, Co-Founder and VP of Research, 451 Research. "Univa’s contribution of Navops Launch to the open source community will help with this process and hopefully be an opportunity for cloud providers to contribute and use Tortuga as the on-ramp for HPC workloads."

Navops Launch offers faster path to the cloud for HPC workloads

While the software is largely used in enterprise HPC environments today, Project Tortuga is a general purpose cluster and cloud management framework with applicability to a broad set of applications including high performance computing, big data frameworks, Kubernetes and scale-out machine learning/deep learning environments. Tortuga automates the deployment of these clusters in local on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid-cloud configurations through repeatable templates.

Tortuga can provision and manage both virtual and bare-metal environments and includes cloud-specific adapters for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with full support for bring-your-own image (BYOI). The built-in policy engine allows users to dynamically create, scale and teardown cloud-based infrastructure in response to changing workload demand. Management, monitoring and accounting of cloud resources is the same as for local servers.

"There is no denying that enterprises are increasingly migrating key workloads to the cloud, and our HPC customers are no exception," said Gary Tyreman, President and CEO of Univa. "We have seen a prominent up-tick of enterprise HPC users looking to tap the vast potential of the public cloud. To stimulate a more robust and broad path to the cloud, we have decided to open source one of Univa’s core products with an eye on simplifying and bringing community involvement to the cloud onboarding process."

Delivering a commercially supported cloud management system to The Wharton School

When it looked to migrating to the cloud, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania was faced with either developing its own software or finding a proven, supported solution. While its HPCC hardware is located on the Penn campus, Navops Launch now allows Wharton to triple its core count with Amazon Web Services EC2 (AWS), with users accessing "anything and everything." This new flexibility allows researchers to scale beyond on-campus resources, work in isolated environments, and control their own services and costs. "Navops Launch was a solid choice. Being able to use a commercially supported cloud management system that is tightly integrated with Univa Grid Engine is a big plus for us," said Gavin Burris, Senior Project Leader, The Wharton School.

Availability

The open source project is available now at https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga