John "Hoot" Thompson        ​
GSFC Private Cloud

Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Building 21 Room 183A
(Cookies at 10:30 AM)

Information technology clouds have been and will continue to dominate the air space, and for good reason. With advancements in virtualization technologies and the inability of most applications to dominate physical resources, sharing resources makes logical sense. Clouds provide the opportunity to leverage centralized assets—processing and storage—as well as system administrators so that subject matter experts can focus on their core missions of science, engineering, finance, etc. Leveraging the experience of the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) and knowledge gained building the Advanced Data Analytics Platform (ADAPT), a team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is building the Goddard Private Cloud (GPC). A GPC prototype is up and running in support of multiple early adopters from a variety of disciplines. The design features high-capacity storage and robust hypervisors all orchestrated by OpenStack cloud management technology. Plans are in place to take the capability into production with a true high-availability design spanning multiple buildings on the Goddard campus. This talk will provide an overview of the GPC and its capabilities.

Hoot Thompson, a University of Virginia graduate with nearly forty years of engineering experience, serves as CTO and lead systems architect for PTP, LLC, a Maryland based IT firm specializing in High Performance Computing applications. His focus over the past fifteen years has been storage and related technologies such as storage area networks (SAN) and shared file systems.

As lead of the NCCS Advanced Technology group, Hoot works closely with candidate vendors assessing new hardware and software capabilities that have the potential to enhance the services delivered to the NASA science community. As an example, Hoot has spent significant time benchmarking cloud relevant technologies in particular virtualized Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnects. This work culminated with speaking engagements at the 2011 Intel Developers Forum and the 2013 Red Hat Summit as well as presentations at the annual supercomputing conference. His research was one of the catalysts that led to the development of the ADAPT virtualized environment, the data centric environment that’s providing new levels of personalized capabilities to the NCCS user community.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Keith Keller

Sign language interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040