In this project students are going to be automating the deployment of their clusters using Ansible, Terraform and CI/CD pipelines. The project will teach you the basics of collaboratively contributing to an open-source project, by addressing “Issues” and submitting “Pull Request".

At the completion of the project, students would have contributed sections to the Selection Round tutorial content, demonstrating to future students how they can use automation to deploy a cluster and run the High Performance LinPACK benchmark.

Week 1: Revisiting the Student Cluster Competition Selection Round

• Topics: Prepare your head node and compute node virtual machines
• Tasks:
  • Redeploy your cluster infrastructure on Sebowa
  • Familiarize yourself with GitHub Project Management tools

Week 2: Use Ansible to Deploy and Configure your 2nd Compute Node

• Topics: Use Ansible to install and configure software on your nodes
• Tasks:
  • Configure the system software and libraries needed to run HPL
    Use Ansible playbooks to download, configure and run HPL

Week 3: Use CI / CD Pipelines to Trigger Workflows to Deploy and Configure your 3rd Compute Node

• Topics: Configure CI / CD workflows that use the Ansible playbooks you’ve prepared
• Tasks:
  • Configure CI / CD pipelines that utilize Ansible to configure, install and deploy your compute nodes
    This pipeline should also configure, deploy and run the HPL benchmark, and store the output.

Week 4: Prepare GitHub Markdown Documentation

• Topics: Document the steps involved in your automation deployment
• Tasks:
  • Prepare user documentation for someone else to be able to reproduce your steps

Week 5: Submit a Pull Request to the Selection Round Project

• Topics: Add section 5.v to Tutorial 4 describing how to use Ansible and CI/CD to run HPL
• Tasks:
  • Create a feature branch that adds a section with pictures to the tutorial content
  • Submit a PR

Week 6: Final Project Poster Presentations and Discussions

• Tasks:
  • Students will present the Ansible and CI/CD pipelines for deploying infrastructure and running software
  • Discuss challenges and insights gained throughout the project
  • Explore the prospective of how they intend to apply automation in the future