Partners¶
Vishwanath Grid is a federation. Every partner university contributes a small amount of compute capacity and gets access to the whole shared pool in return.
If you are landing here without context: Vishwanath Grid is a research-computing cluster that several Indian universities run together. The first site is live at MIT-WPU Pune; the platform is open-source from end to end. See About for the longer introduction.
What a partner contributes¶
A partner site brings three things:
- Hardware — typically a server, a workstation, or a small rack. Whatever is appropriate to the partner's size. Hardware stays physically on the partner campus.
- A point of contact — one person who can be reached for site-local questions and who runs the on-campus install with help from the Vishwanath Grid team.
- A short written agreement — a memorandum of understanding covering acceptable use, resource accounting, and how to exit the federation cleanly if needed.
What a partner gets¶
- Use of the whole pool. Researchers from a partner site can run jobs on any partner's hardware, with no per-job charges between partners.
- One login. A partner's existing identity system (if they have one) plugs into the federation, so researchers do not see a new password.
- Tools. Every service listed on the Services page is available to partner-site researchers as it comes online.
- Visibility. Partner administrators see every job that ran on their machines, and the accounting numbers they need to report back internally.
- Operational help. The Vishwanath Grid team runs the install at the partner site and is on call for the first few months of operation.
How to become a partner¶
Becoming a partner starts with a 30-minute call. We walk through the project, look at what kind of hardware the partner can contribute, and agree what an initial six months of operation would look like.
If that goes well, the next step is the written agreement and a site install date.