eXact lab S.r.l. is proud to announce the open sourcing of our Virtual HPC Cluster (vHPC), a containerised Slurm-Based High Performance Computing environment designed as an educational and testing tool.
What is vHPC?
Virtual HPC Cluster (vHPC) is a container-based environment that virtualizes a HPC system. This containerized solution is specifically designed for:
- teaching, providing users with a safe environment
to familiarize themselves with HPC systems;
before accessing production clusters, - testing and development purposes, providing developers
with a controlled way to experiment with a Slurm cluster.
The system was designed around our practical need to test locally software that relies on or interacts with HPC clusters with very quick update cycles. It includes the Pareto-80% of what most HPC
workflows need:
- Slurm job scheduling
- Full
sacctjob accounting functionality backed by MariaDB - OpenMPI for parallel computing
For the remaining 20% specific to each project, we devised a runtime customization mechanism that doesn’t require rebuilding container images. This enables extremely rapid iteration cycles, allowing developers to test configuration changes, debug cluster issues, and prototype HPC workflows within seconds rather than waiting for lengthy image rebuilds or even longer test campaigns on busy production clusters.
Why We Open-Sourced This
At eXact lab, we believe that learning HPC concepts and testing code that interacts with HPC systems shouldn’t require access to expensive production infrastructure. Whether you’re a researcher learning Slurm for the first time, an educator teaching parallel computing concepts, or a developer testing applications before deploying to real clusters, you should be able to experiment safely in a local
environment.
This project represents years of our experience in scientific computing and HPC infrastructure. By open-sourcing it under the MIT license, we’re making HPC education and development more accessible to the broader community.
Get Started Today
The complete project is available on GitHub with comprehensive documentation, examples, and pre-built container images. Just copy our docker compose,
docker compose up -dand you are ready to go!
Visit our GitHub repository to explore the code, documentation, and examples.
About eXact lab
eXact lab S.r.l. is a consultancy specializing in scientific and high-performance computing solutions. We help organizations optimize their computational workflows, implement scalable HPC infrastructure, and accelerate scientific research through tailored solutions.
The Virtual HPC Cluster project is released under the MIT License and available at github.com/exactlab/vhpc
