Jakub Szarlat1
1XENON Systems, Springvale, Australia
Biography:
Jakub Szarlat is an experienced Senior Solutions Architect with broad experience in HPC, AI, data storage and management, scientific applications, software stacks and workflows.
With a degree in Software Engineering, Jakub has a unique ability of bridging distinct systems to work as a total solution.
Jakub is an expert in architecting, deploying, and managing traditional and virtualised HPC clusters, large, distributed data storage and archive solutions, and cloud computing environments for a variety of use cases ranging from Microscopy VDI to Bioinformatics and other GPU workloads. In addition, he is supporting researchers compiling, debugging, deploying, and running their applications.
His exposure to large scientific data sets brings a world of expertise in understanding their implication on today's infrastructure and data management.
More recently at XENON, Jakub has been utilising container technologies to provide more customisable and stable HPC deployments both on-prem and in the cloud.
Abstract:
As containerized workloads continue to rise in popularity, Kubernetes (K8s) has become a dominant force in modern computing environments. Yet, traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) workload managers remain widely used. In this presentation, we’ll delve into the fundamental nature of a compute node and examine the differences between running a node as a container versus on bare metal.
We’ll introduce an innovative approach: using a container as the foundation for a physical server image. This method offers compelling advantages in terms of maintainability, preservation, portability, and security.
Finally, we’ll explore how both container-based and physical images can be rapidly deployed to support HPC workloads, highlighting the practical benefits of this hybrid strategy.