Kubernetes Batch + HPC Day North America 2022

Academic institutions run their own e-infrastructure comprising HPC systems with batch scheduling, cloud infrastructure that allows users to run VMs, and in the last few years, a container infrastructure to run containers. Frequently utilized softwares across all environments are various interactive applications. However, they are not suitable for running in HPC or cloud (as VM), since setting them up requires infrastructural technical knowledge which poses unnecessary load on users. In the Czech NREN, we identified opportunities, situations, use cases where we leveraged K8s for academic use. We decided to offer managed K8s infrastructure for research where users focus solely on their application (container image). Integration with the rest of the infrastructures is DevOps team task. We come to present the progress we have made in this field since the first version of our infrastructure during KCNA 2021. We discuss what a managed K8s infrastructure can offer, e.g. traditional Jupyter notebooks, RStudio servers, but also true 3D game streaming, personalised storage, and much more. Lastly, we open a discussion on the challenges we had to face and issues that are yet to be solved.