The laboratory plans to use the Oxide rack as a “proving ground” for secure multi-tenancy.
Oxide Computer Company and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are teaming up to bring on-premises cloud capabilities to the LLNL supercomputing centre.
The startup will deploy its rack-scale Oxide Cloud Computer at LLNL’s high performance computing (HPC) centre in Livermore, California, to enable Livermore Computing users to access virtualised services alongside HPC workloads.
Users will be able to run typical HPC batch workloads for scientific simulations while also accessing cloud-like services such as databases, Jupyter notebooks, orchestration tools, and Kubernetes clusters while remaining secure and on-premises.
“On-premises environments are the next frontier for cloud computing,” said Steve Tuck, CEO at Oxide Computer Company.
“LLNL is tackling some of the hardest and most important problems in science and technology, requiring advanced hardware, software, and cloud capabilities. We are thrilled to be working with their exceptional team to help advance those efforts, delivering an integrated system that meets their rigorous requirements for performance, efficiency, and security.”
In addition to giving LLNL staff access to virtual machines, the laboratory plans to use the Oxide rack as a “proving ground” for secure multi-tenancy and integration with its Flux resource manager.
As well as LLNL staff, researchers at the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories will be able to use the Oxide Cloud Computer.
“We look forward to working with Oxide to integrate this machine within our HPC centre,” said Todd Gamblin, distinguished member of technical staff at LLNL. “Oxide’s Cloud Computer will allow us to securely support new types of workloads for users, and it will be a proving ground for introducing cloud-like features to operational processes and user workflows. We expect Oxide’s open source software stack and their transparent and open approach to development to help us work closely together.”
LLNL and Oxide plan to expand the deployment in the future with additional cloud computers.
Oxide launched its on-prem cloud computing rack system in November 2023. The rack system can have 16, 24, or 32 Compute Sleds and 16-32 processors with x86 cores. The compute sled is made up of AMD Epyc 7713P processors and uses Intel Tofino 2 switches.
The company was founded by CEO Steve Tuck and CTO Bryan Cantrill, and has been developing the rack system since 2019. The company counts Idaho National Laboratory among its customers.
Oxide has also deployed its racks at a CoreSite data centre in Silicon Valley.
