What are Cloud Services?

Cloud services can be on-premises (on-premises or on-prem; i.e., hosted by LC), off-premises (off-prem; i.e., hosted at facility other than LC; e.g., LANL HPC center), and cloud-proper (what the rest of the world might imagine the cloud to be; e.g., Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.). 

Common cloud-proper ways of working "in the cloud" include connecting to platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine. In using cloud services, users typically connect to remote data centers over the internet. One of the benefits of using these platforms is that users can access the infrastructure they need on demand, without needing to maintain hardware and environments that may sit around unused for much of the time.

LLNL offers traditional cloud or cloud-proper options through Amazon Web Services for a fee. For more about LivCloud, see the ServiceNow knowledgebase article.

On-Prem: The Livermore Computing Solution

At LC, security is paramount in our multi-tenant environment and we want to ensure you have access to enabling technologies ushered in by the cloud for improved efficiencies in HPC. To this end, we are supporting software and services including: several AI/ML tools, persistent data services (PDS), containers in LC HPC, object storage, LaunchIT, workflow tools, and web frameworks. Many of these containerized services are orchestrated by LC OpenShift which is built upon Kubernetes.

Pages covering each of these on-prem offerings can now (or will soon) be found in the menu to the left.