Tortuga automates the deployment of these clusters in local on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid-cloud configurations through repeatable templates.

Univa, a provider of on-premise and hybrid cloud workload management solutions for enterprise HPC customers, has open sourced its products called Navops Launch as an open source project. Christened Project Tortuga, the code base has been released under permissive Apache 2.0 license, which is the default choice in the enterprise space.

The project has been published on GitHub, opening it to the broader Open Source community for consumption and contribution.

What does Project Tortuga do?

Tortuga automates the deployment of these clusters in local on-premise, cloud-based and hybrid-cloud configurations through repeatable templates.

Build vs buy

Univa is following the battle-tested open source-commercial route. While Project Tortuga will evolve as a community-driven project, the company will continue to commercialize it as Navops Launch so customers can get the commercial support they need if they want to. Or they can just take the code from GitHub and build it themselves. It’s the typical and ideal ‘build vs buy’ model seen in the open source world. If you have technological resources, go ahead build it, if not then get commercial support from Univa.

Navops Launch vs Project Tortuga

There won’t be any difference between the two cousins, however Univa makes it clear that while Navops Launch is largely used in enterprise HPC environments today, Project Tortuga is a general-purpose cluster and cloud management framework with applicability to a broad set of applications including high-performance computing, big data frameworks, Kubernetes and scale-out machine learning / deep learning environments.

Project Tortuga is capable of provisioning and managing both virtual and bare-metal environments. As a result, it includes cloud-specific adapters for AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with full support for the bring-your-own image (BYOI).

It comes with a built-in policy engine that allows users to dynamically create, scale and teardown cloud-based infrastructure in response to changing workload demand. Management, monitoring, and accounting of cloud resources is the same  for local servers. 

Who is using it?

The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, chose Navops Launch when they embarked on their cloud journey. Their HPCC hardware is located on the Penn campus. Navops Launch now allows Wharton to triple its core count with Amazon Web Services EC2 (AWS), with users accessing “anything and everything.”

This new flexibility allows researchers to scale beyond on-campus resources, work in isolated environments, and control their own services and costs. “Navops Launch was a solid choice. Being able to use a commercially supported cloud management system that is tightly integrated with Univa Grid Engine is a big plus for us,” said Gavin Burris, Senior Project Leader, The Wharton School.

It’s a win-win situation

Having a public GitHub repository for your product under a permissive open source license gives a company more credence and mindshare. Users know beforehand that they don’t run the risk of being locked into that vendor. They also know that if there are bug fixes and feature requests, they can jump into the code and do it themselves. That’s a lot of power. Which also means that Navops Launch has made itself more welcoming to potential customers.

Everything that ends in Open Source ends well.