Univa is looking to the open source community to help evolve its Navops Launch platform for enterprises migrating high-performance computing (HPC) workloads to the cloud. The open source efforts will run under the Project Tortuga banner, with access available through an Apache 2.0 license model.

Rob LaLonde, general manager and vice president for Navops at Univa, explained that the open source plan will focus on general purpose cluster and cloud management frameworks. This includes the ability to automate the deployment of clusters in local on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid-cloud configurations. These will be applicable to applications like HPC, big data frameworks, Kubernetes, machine learning, and deep learning environments.

The platform can also control various container platforms like the increasingly common Docker-based containers and more HPC specific ones like Singularity and Shifter.

Support will include provisioning and management of virtual and bare-metal environments. Adapters can plug into Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, and OpenStack infrastructure.

“An enterprise can set up the policy so the platform can scale clusters to the cloud in a dynamic fashion,” LaLonde said. “The end user does not need to even know where the application is running.”

Univa's Navops Launch product will continue to be offered and targeted at enterprise HPC environments. LaLonde explained that basically the Tortuga Project will be upstream of its operations, while the Navops Launch product will be downstream.

LaLonde said the open source move is an attempt to build a community around the platform to further development and adoption in the enterprise space. That would include expansion beyond the focus today on support for Univa’s Grid Engine and HPC work into the ability to support options like bursting Kubernetes deployments to the cloud.

“That is something that is not really supported today, but something that might come along down the road,” LaLonde said.

The move is not Univa’s first turn to the open source community.

The company was one of the founding members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) when it launched in mid-2015. That launch was on the back of Google’s donation of its Borg platform to the open source community, which was rechristened as Kubernetes.

Univa last year contributed its universal resource broker (USB) technology to the open source community. That software allows distributed application frameworks written for Apache Mesos to run seamlessly on Univa’s Grid Engine platform. At the same time Univa added Kubernetes support to the USB platform.

LaLonde said it was too early to speculate if Univa would look to move Project Tortuga to a broader open source ecosystem like CNCF, noting: “we will see where it goes.”

Higher performing container platforms are gaining increased attention from the cloud community.

Just this week, IBM added bare metal support for Kubernetes-helmed container deployments in an attempt to offer better performance. The software and cloud giant did not specifically announce plans to target the HPC space with the support, but did note the move will boost efforts for companies in need of high computing performance.

“This includes large machine learning workloads and sensitive datasets that require isolated servers,” explained Jason McGee, vice president and CTO for IBM’s cloud platform, in a blog post.

LaLonde said Univa remains focused on broader cloud architectures, though it could look to add a bare metal option down the road.

“There will always be those that want the most performance, and that is likely to be something on bare metal,” LaLonde said.

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