Where I'll be going and what I'll be doing

Hi everyone!

So this post will be like a little background on my internship in Japan, talking about my workplace and my roles.

First, let's start off with the workplace. I'll be going to the Grid Infraware Research Group at the Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). AIST is a public research institute largely funded by the Japanese Government and has many campuses located throughout Japan, with the headquarters being in Tsukuba and Tokyo. The ITRI is located in the Tsukuba campus.

Tsukuba (つくば市) is about 50 kilometers north-east of Tokyo. It is very easy to travel from Tokyo to Tsukuba, thanks to the Tsukuba Express (TX) which only takes 50 - 55 minutes. However, from the Narita Airport, there is also bus service, which takes longer but can be more convenient if you have luggage with you.

Location of Tsukuba on Google Maps

Next, let's talk about what I'll be doing at AIST. The Grid Infraware Research Group, as the name suggests, deals with the lower layers of grid or cloud computing, also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). For example, researching the best way to assign virtual machines to users from a pool of computers, or how to best move virtual machines from one computer to another computer to reduce downtime. Ninja Migration is an example of a recent research done by the ITRI.

(Warning: Skip the following paragraph if you're afraid of technical details.)

The project I've been assigned to is to add PCI Passthrough support to CloudStack and the main goal is to be able to use InfiniBand on the virtual machines. I'm sure many of you are confused right now (like I was when I was first informed about the project), so I'll explain it step-by-step. CloudStack is an open-source software for managing virtual machines. Users can login to CloudStack and ask the system to provide them with a virtual machine they can use for whatever purpose they need it for. Now, the virtual machines usually connect to the outside world via a virtualized network card. However, these are (relatively) slow and not suited for High Performance Computing (HPC) where InfiniBand is very popular. To fully use InfiniBand, one need to allow the virtual machines to directly access the InfiniBand card, which can be done using PCI Passthrough. PCI Passthrough is already supported by Linux and KVM, the underlying hypervisor, and only the configuration and provisioning part needs to be added to CloudStack.

(End of technical part: everyone can come back now)

And that's it for this post. If there's anything you'd like to know, please feel free to leave a comment!