Introduction

This section records develop process of COHPC (Cloud on HPC). The project has been made open source and source code could be found here.

Chapters

• Setup Slurm HPC cluster
• Build modules on HPC cluster
• Boot Windows on QEMU 9.2.0
• A bug caused by MAC address

CoHPC project introduction

This project is meant to build a system that could launch virtual machines on a HPC cluster.

On a HPC cluster, user could not have privilege (such as by sudo) and usually require user to submit tasks via task schedulers such as Slurm workload manager.

CoHPC provides a way to launch virtual machines and mount files into the virtual machine, and all these could be done without any privilege.

Possible application scenario

Assuming you processed a bunch of data on a HPC cluster. It’s usually big (especially data in fields like chemistry, biology, etc.) and expensive to download data and visualizing or processing them locally, while sometimes you might want to just have a look whether this bunch of data is feasible or not.

So with CoHPC you could launch a VM in seconds (including Windows ones), mount your data into the VM and utilize tools pre-installed in the VM to deal with the data, e.g. visualize them, and without transmitting all those data.