Ubiquity – The Next Generation HPC and AI Platform for Large-Scale Computing
The Problem
Despite the immense potential and opportunities presented by High-Performance Computing (HPC) in accelerating business innovation and scientific research, several challenges exist that hinder its widespread adoption and optimisation.
At the heart of this lies the widespread lack of awareness and specialised expertise necessary to operate and leverage HPC systems efficiently. This gap is further exacerbated in the academic realm, where the roles of software developer, systems engineer, and researcher often converge leading to suboptimal software development practices, poor testing procedures, and inadequate archiving protocols.
There exists a crucial need for a HPC solution that can address these multi-faceted challenges, providing an accessible, efficient, and sustainable platform for users to harness the power of large-scale computing across hybrid environments.
Logicalis has invested in the future of HPC environments and back to the HPC community at-large by developing a solution to this, in the form of a software stack and framework called Ubiquity.
What is Ubiquity...?
Ubiquity is a powerful, autonomous platform designed to accelerate and simplify the deployment and management of HPC resources. It is designed around the concept of Ubiquitous Computing, which aims to make complex infrastructure and computing platforms simpler and easier to use, transforming what is possible by both users and administrators.
The Ubiquity project delivers a software stack that is fully open-source and platform-independent, enabling the rapid deployment of containerised HPC platforms across on-premises and in-cloud environments.
This approach significantly reduces complexity and time to deploy for large-scale computing solutions. Ubiquity also delivers increased flexibility to scale through a choice of hardware platforms or clouds as requirements and workloads change over time, ensuring the best business decisions can be made without risk.
HPC Everywhere. Fast. Secure. Sustainable.
Ubiquity delivers a new generation of dynamic HPC platform, providing users and HPC teams alike with the performance, reliability, and flexibility they need to support their computing and AI challenges. A few of the key features it delivers are:
- Reduces "time to results": The ability to rapidly spin up scientific computing environments reduces the IT overhead from many research projects. This helps researchers get back to doing research by minimising system admin and management time.
- Improves Sustainability: By being able to dynamically scale to your needs, having a reduced time to deploy, and enabling the same workflow on a laptop or workstation, as in the cloud or on-premises.
- Enables mobility of research: By leveraging cloud-native technologies, researchers can share their work between organisations safe in the knowledge that it will work on other systems, including in the cloud if necessary.
- Supports custom heterogenous environments: HPC teams should be able to pick the best tool for the job. By being able to run containerised workloads, Ubiquity provides this functionality out of the box.
- Drives quality of code: By leveraging GitOps methodologies and best practices and having definable CI/CD workflows for users, it enables the driving up of code quality using improved software review workflows, providing improvements in efficiency, which drives sustainability and cost-savings on energy.
- Drives collaboration: By having collaboration tooling on-cluster, we can remove the need to go off-cluster to do collaborative work.
- Ensures security: By continually scanning the environment for vulnerabilities within both the codebase and the infrastructure in addition to malicious code execution protection via definable policies, we provide a high level of assurance that your security posture is good.
- Fully open-source: Because of our commitment to open-source, we drive innovation and collaboration with other projects, and give back to the wider community. It also ensures that you get the platform you want, with opportunities to co-develop alongside Logicalis.
Ubiquity Feature Sets
Ubiquity is feature-packed, for here is an overview of what Ubiquity provides:
Ubiquity Technology Highlights
A small selection of the highlights of a Ubiquity solution (but non-exhaustive - There is so much more it can do!) are as follows:
Secure & Compliant By-Design
By providing live code execution protection, container code scanning and network segmentation we provide a best-in-class experience for HPC environments - Ensuring trusted research environments can be provisioned and achieved from day one.
Enterprise-Grade Observability and Performance Profiling
The saying "if you can't monitor it, you can't manage it" is never truer than for High-Performance Computing environments.
Ubiquity addresses this key component of such an environment by providing enterprise-grade observability and performance profiling out of the box.
Leveraging industry-leading technologies to do this, we can monitor and performance profile a Ubiquity environment with an extremely minimal overhead, producing the ability to know exactly what your environment is doing and how it is doing it, empowering you to improve your performance.
The Best Connectivity of Any HPC Platform
High-Performance Computing harnesses the power of the industry's most powerful computing solutions to solve complex problems requiring massive, high-speed computation.
However, to achieve this a solution needs to be able to communicate effectively. Ubiquity delivers this by supporting all network manufacturers and high-speed interconnects - And by providing the ability to communicate across environments to federate resources, including the ability to burst to cloud via our hybrid cloud capabilities, we believe that it offers the best connectivity in the market.
Because of this ubiquitous approach to compute capacity and how it is addressed, we ensure the barrier to entry is kept low and consistent.
Ubiquitous Storage Support
Our storage solutions delivered via Ubiquity allow for not only the provision of multiple filesystems across multiple enclosures (with support from multiple vendors), but also directly supports the integration of existing storage solutions into a Ubiquity environment. We support all major filesystems as a result, ensuring there are no surprises or hurdles to overcome.
HPC Self-Service Environments
The ability to user a cluster is just as important, if not more so, than the power of the cluster itself. As a result, access to a cluster and the ability to provision workloads is a key importance for Ubiquity, and so we ensure we can deliver a seamless experience using a self-serve platform.
This self-serve platform allows users to spin up environments they need, securely and safely, with administrators able to do full cost control and manage which applications can run, alongside controlling maximum sizes of environments.
Accelerated Computing And Heterogenous Environment Support
With the field ever-changing, it is important now more than ever to ensure platform flexibility to support new hardware, and new accelerators.
Logicalis has met this challenge head-on with Ubiquity, with support for multi-arch out of the box, alongside a wide range of accelerator and GPU support.
ARM and RISC-V support are included, and the ability to run on custom environments (such as mainframes for example) is in the works. We want to ensure you never need to choose one or the other - But instead simply choose the right tool at the right price for the workload.
Quote from Chris Coates
High-performance computing solutions have historically become more complex, impacting the ability to both maintain and exploit the capabilities available. We have identified this as a significant risk, and as such the Ubiquity project is striving to address this risk by applying Ubiquitous Computing concepts toward HPC and in general large-scale computing environments. This approach will fundamentally change what is possible within HPC environments by making things simpler and more intuitive to do.
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