Concepts and Terminology

CONVERGE Horizon is built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This section describes key OCI concepts as they relate to CONVERGE Horizon. For more complete descriptions of the terms below, refer to OCI documentation.

Access node

The access node (known as a “bastion” in OCI terminology) is a virtual machine that provides secure access to HPC compute nodes via SSH. Each organization has one access node within their child tenancy.

Object storage

Object storage is a storage architecture that allows you to store and manage data as objects. It is suitable for storing a large amount of data that does not change very frequently.

Users have a separate bucket in object storage for each organization to which they belong. These buckets can be accessed on the Storage tab of the CONVERGE Horizon application.

Users upload CONVERGE input files to object storage before submitting jobs. After compute nodes have been provisioned for a submitted job, CONVERGE Horizon copies the input files from object storage to a scratch working directory attached to the compute instance. After the job is completed, CONVERGE Horizon copies both the input and output files from the scratch directory back to object storage.

Shape

A compute shape is a template that determines the compute resources allocated to an instance. CONVERGE Horizon offers several preconfigured options based on OCI shapes, as listed below. Refer to OCI shape documentation for detailed hardware information.

Option	OCI Shape	Cores per Node	Memory (GB)
VM-4	VM.Standard.E4.Flex	4	64
VM-32	VM.Standard.E4.Flex	32	128
VM-64	VM.Standard.E4.Flex	64	256
baremetal-128	BM.Standard.E4.128	128	2048

Tenancy

A tenancy is a secure, isolated partition within OCI. CONVERGE Horizon tenancies are managed in a parent-child framework. Convergent Science manages the parent tenancy and creates child tenancies for each organization using CONVERGE Horizon.