PEARC25 Wrap-Up: Community Connections and Warewulf's Growing Impact

CIQ was pleased to both contribute to and support the Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) conference this year at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio!

We brought four people:

• Warewulf community manager and CIQ salesperson, Rose Stein;
• CIQ Open Source head honcho, Chris Short;
• Systems security expert, Jason Rodriguez;
• Warewulf Technical Steering Committee chairperson and HPC engineer for CIQ, Jonathon Anderson.

Our mission was twofold: to share as much information as we could with as many people as we could about the work that CIQ does to support High Performance Computing centers; and to host the Warewulf community “Birds of a Feather” (BoF). Both were a great success! But we also got to make connections with some wonderful people, friends new and old, who shared the work that they are doing, whether in research or in the same infrastructure and services space that CIQ operates in.

Sponsoring the conference and spreading the word

CIQ had a great spot in the exhibition, right at the entrance. In no time, a stream of attendees was at our table, sometimes expressing their appreciation for one of our products that they are already using; other times wanting to learn more about CIQ and what our relationship is with Rocky Linux.

One particular moment that stands out was a visit from Research Data Communication Technologies: they are so passionate about the work they are doing that they held an impromptu poster session to tell us about bioinformatics research in Africa, and the unique benefits of being able to come to PEARC and share and learn best practices with a broader community.

But it’s always great to get feedback on the new things we’re working on, too. In this case, our visitors seemed specifically interested in our new RLC-H and RLC-AI variants of Rocky Linux, as well as the additional value of our new Warewulf Pro offering. We’re excited to get them into more people’s hands!

Hosting the Warewulf BoF

On Tuesday, we hosted the Warewulf community “Birds of a Feather” (BoF), a relatively informal gathering of Warewulf contributors and administrators. This was the first official Warewulf BoF since v4 was released (or maybe ever?), so it was great to see such strong attendance. And while most people in the room were already actively using Warewulf, we did have at least four survey responders who have never used it before! This surprised us, and we will definitely have to do a better job of simply introducing Warewulf and what it is to our audience next time.

Our agenda for the BoF was relatively simple:

• Jonathon gave a quick overview of Warewulf and what’s new in the v4.6 release series, including Warewulf’s new ability to provision to disk.
• Ian Kaufman, a Warewulf community contributor from University of California, San Diego, covered the current and upcoming state of support for Warewulf in an Ubuntu (or Debian) environment.
• Joseph Creach from George Washington University gave an experience report of their use of Warewulf, focusing on their experience deploying an IPv6 cluster.

We ended with a community discussion (aided by Tim Middelkoop) and took questions from the audience. From the discussion, there was definite interest in the CIQ Warewulf Pro offering, particularly getting access to its new web interface, an experience that extended into the rest of the conference. We got very positive feedback regarding the quality of Warewulf support, including through community support channels. Feedback for future development largely reiterated interest in “stateful” provisioning (which we were excited to report progress on in v4.6.2!); a desire for highly-available (HA) Warewulf server deployment; and looking forward to additional IPv6 support.

Our thanks to Rose for organizing the event and spreading the word!

Attending the conference

Of course, we got to attend some of the event ourselves, too! We joined multiple BoFs, including those for ColdFront and Open OnDemand, but especially for OpenHPC: OpenHPC is a strong distribution partner for Warewulf v4, and we are glad to continue to work with them on making Warewulf a strong foundation for OpenHPC clusters throughout the industry.

From the technical program, two sessions stand out:

In “Automating HPC Software Compilation, Deployment, and Error Resolution through an LLM-based Multi-Agent System,“ Sean Mondesire from the University of Central Florida presented novel work to automate Spack-based scientific software compilation and deployment using an agentic AI model, with encouraging initial results!

In “OS Upgrades in an HPC Environment,” Craig Gross and Joseph Ryan gave a detailed account of a manual upgrade from CentOS 7.9 to Ubuntu 22.04. It was a valiant and well-organized effort; but, given the challenges they had to overcome, it sure did make me want to spend some time talking with them about how Warewulf might streamline the process in the future!

PEARC is a very student-forward conference, with multiple opportunities for lightning talks and poster presentations. This year’s conference had lots of great content, in topics ranging from agentic AI interaction with arbitrary OpenAPI services to process improvements for the ACCESS resource allocation system.

Full conference proceedings are now available, without any payment or subscription required. Check it out if any of these topics are of interest, and consider attending PEARC26 next year in Minneapolis, Minnesota!