The National Research Platform: Stretched, Multi-Tenant, Scientific Kubernetes Cluster

TL;DR

The paper presents the National Research Platform, a scalable, multi-tenant Kubernetes infrastructure across multiple locations, supporting diverse scientific workloads with advanced security, monitoring, and user interfaces.

Contribution

It introduces a distributed, multi-tenant Kubernetes-based cyberinfrastructure that integrates varied computational resources for collaborative scientific research.

Findings

Supports diverse workloads including AI and machine learning

Provides secure, monitored, and scalable infrastructure

Enables user-friendly access via JupyterHub and Kubernetes

Abstract

The National Research Platform (NRP) represents a distributed, multi-tenant Kubernetes-based cyberinfrastructure designed to facilitate collaborative scientific computing. Spanning over 75 locations in the U.S. and internationally, the NRP uniquely integrates varied computational resources, ranging from single nodes to extensive GPU and CPU clusters, to support diverse research workloads including advanced AI and machine learning tasks. It emphasizes flexibility through user-friendly interfaces such as JupyterHub and low level control of resources through direct Kubernetes interaction. Critical operational insights are discussed, including security enhancements using Kubernetes-integrated threat detection, extensive monitoring, and comprehensive accounting systems. This paper highlights the NRP's growing importance and scalability in addressing the increasing demands for distributed scientific computational resources.