Talk Title: ESI: Details, Status, and Switch Management Tool

Talk Abstract: In the past year, usage of ESI within the MOC has grown in exciting ways. Learn how ESI is being used, and the lessons the development team has learned as we continue to grow ESI’s capabilities.

ESI has been actively deployed within the Mass Open Cloud, overseeing the management of numerous racks of servers and switches. Researchers leverage ESI’s leasing mechanism to allocate bare-metal servers for a variety of projects.

Managing a fleet of network switches in a research environment is always a challenge due to the amount of collaboration that happens between different parties. In this talk I’ll discuss using Ansible to deploy switch manifests, which are backed by git. This allows the whole network to have the powerful version control features of git, while also allowing for better collaboration when hosted on GitHub through pull requests.

Bios: Naved graduated from Boston University in 2016 and has been involved with the Mass Open Cloud since then.

Tzu-Mainn Chen is a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. He has been working on Elastic Secure Infrastructure for quite a while now, and is excited to see the architecture blossom.

Hakan is an engineer at MOC Alliance with a background in HPC systems and networks. He continues to manage research networks at MOC Alliance and writes tooling around the management and monitoring of these networks, in addition to working at the MGHPCC datacenter for compute and networks. He remains a master’s student of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst.