OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

Supercell

Supercell

What is Supercell?

The OSUOSL Supercell cluster is a service that will enable projects to do testing for their software on various operating systems. This generally falls into the following types of requirements:

  • Continuous build integration on various architectures/operating systems
  • Run-time tests of application
  • Low-level debugging (for non-x86 architectures)

Currently the cluster consists of x86-based virtualization machines using Linux KVM and managed via Ganeti. Users of the system will interact with their VM's via Ganeti Web Manager to create, remove and access the VNC console to their VM's. The majority of the Supercell infrastructure is powered by Gentoo Linux.

Supercell is currently in early beta as a few partner open source projects help us test out the cluster. You can sign up to receive an announcement when the cluster is opened up for additional testers by completing our Feedback Form.

Which guest operating systems does Supercell support?

The current supported guest operating systems are:

  • Debian 32/64bit
  • CentOS 32/64bit
  • Gentoo 32/64bit
  • Gentoo 32/64bit Hardened
  • Ubuntu 32/64bit

Do you have plans to support other guest operating systems?

We hope to eventually add support for the following operating systems:

  • Fedora
  • FreeBSD
  • OpenSUSE
  • Windows

We need your help to determine which guest operating systems the community would most like to see us support. Please take a moment to fill out our Feedback Form to share your thoughts and to be notified when Supercell is ready for use by more open source projects.

What about testing on OSX?

We currently have two Mac OS X XServe machines available for testing software on. We only offer shared ssh accounts currently.

Do you have plans to support architectures beyond x86?

We hope to eventually support other architectures, but that is a long-term goal. Eventually, we would like to support the following architectures:

  • Alpha
  • ARM
  • ARMel
  • HPPA
  • IA-64
  • MIPS
  • MIPSel
  • PowerPC
  • SPARC

What kind of hardware is used for the Supercell cluster?

Hardware Type CPU RAM Disk Services
2 x Dell R815 4 x Opteron 6172 (2.1 Ghz, 12-core) 128G 6 x 300GB 10K SAS Ganeti Node
Dell R510 2 x Intel E5620 (2.4Ghz, 4-core) 12G 12 x 1T 7.2K near-line SAS NFS Storage
2 x Apple Xserve Intel Xeon (2.26Ghz, 4-core) 24G 1 x 160G 7.2 SATA Mac OS X testing

Where can I learn more about the Supercell architecture?

To learn more about how the Open Source Lab uses Ganeti, check out Lance Albertson's blog post and his presentation from LinuxCon 2010.

When can I use Supercell?

Supercell is currently in early beta. We're rolling out the service to a few project partners for use, and we look forward to their feedback on how we can improve Supercell. We hope to open it up to the wider open source community very soon.

How much will it cost for open source projects to use Supercell?

We have no plans to charge open source projects for using this service. The creation of Supercell was made possible through a generous monetary and hardware donation from Facebook and their Open Source Team. The OSU Open Source Lab is currently seeking additional Sponsors for the Supercell project.