In order to assist educational institutions through the power of information technology and help schools acquire more computing resources for educational purposes, NARLabs' National Center for High‑Performance Computing (NCHC) under the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has built a top-tier environment for high-speed computing and intelligent application technology. Their edu-cloud platform, based on cloud-native[1] architecture, has not only been readily adopted by many schools, but also won a Red Hat APAC Innovation Award this year.
The Red Hat Innovation Award is a global competition, and the NCHC is one of this year's Asia-Pacific winners for demonstrating the edu-cloud's use of open-source technology to impROVe productivity and responsiveness, reduce costs, make a positive community impact, and increase capability to respond to future trends and challenges.
NCHC Deputy Director General Shih-Hao Hung stated that NCHC supercomputer graphics cards are often replaced in order to pROVide the best computing services; however, for AI classrooms or workshops in most educational institutions, these retired graphics cards can still be of great use for teaching and training students. Therefore, the NCHC has pooled these graphics cards together and began offering its resources to outside users through the edu-cloud. This can meet the needs of AI exercises, experiments, and study, and also nurture more future talent in high-performance computing for Taiwan. As for technology selection, because the NCHC expects edu-clouds to have key features such as fast rollout, easy maintenance, and friendly user interfaces, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift were finally selected for use, as they allow developers to automatically install, upgrade, and manage the life cycle of containers in the cloud stack, helping Taiwan's students to have a better education experience.
[1]Cloud-native architectures and technologies pROVide methods to design, build, and manage workloads built into the cloud and leverage cloud computing models.
