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A new high-performance hardware for GARR Cloud services

Pubblicato il 03 March 2023

The installation and configuration of the new computing and storage resources were completed successfully.

Approximately 10,000 computing cores are now available, along with 13 PB of raw disk (of which approximately 15% on solid state disk) and advanced computing server for access to 40 latest generation GPUs (NVIDIA A30/A100 model). This infrastructure, built on open source products, is used directly by users of the GARR community, who mostly access it in IaaS mode. Over the last year, access to services has increased with approximately 550 active users in over 300 research group projects and over 1400 virtual machines used (+11% compared to the previous year).

GARR Computing and Distributed Storage department (CSD) handled the installation and service migration on the new infrastructure entirely.

In parallel with the renewal of the existing hardware resources, the operating systems of all the calculation and storage servers were updated, the releases of Openstack and Ceph (the software-defined storage solution in use) were upgraded and the container was upgraded, ensuring service continuity and minimising inconvenience for GARR Cloud users. Other components, such as electricity distribution and the management network, have also been updated in all five sites that host the data centres (Cosenza, Catania, Palermo, Naples, and Turin), which are located or adjacent to the respective PoPs of the GARR network.

The support of the vendors and their respective commercial partners, the effective availability of technical contacts in the offices hosting the data centres (University of Palermo, Southern National Laboratories of INFN in Catania, University of Calabria in Cosenza, Parthenope University in Naples, University of Turin), and the professionalism of GARR administration staff were all critical to the operation's success. The international context, which is characterised by the difficulty of obtaining ICT components, has made the activities more demanding in terms of trying to coordinate the interventions of the various vendors, managing orders, delivery times, and installations.