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CRC Getting started on ORION

ORION: Owl Research Infrastructure - Open Nebula is Rice’s private research cloud computing service.  Open Nebula is open source software that orchestrates and manages virtual machines and allows for self-service via a web dashboard, much like commercial cloud virtual machine offerings such as AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine (GCE), or Azure VMs.  ORION has the advantage of residing within Rice's internal network, such that ORION virtual machines can interact easily with Rice research computing cyberinfrastructure.

How can the ORION compute platform help researchers?  There are certain types of workflows which are not well suited to a conventional HPC (High Performance Computing) environment; for example:

    • Long run times won’t fit within cluster scheduler limits
    • Single threaded applications that don’t scale well with more cores
    • Interactive compute tasks with many pipelines, calibration steps, etc.
    • Persistent services (i.e., web-based research portals)
    • Ad-hoc or experimental compute jobs which involve a lot of trial and error

ORION Virtual Machines can help with:

    • Unlimited run times
    • Complete user control over the computing environment
    • Flexible and easy to spin up quickly, interactive
    • Reproducibility of the software environment
ORION Account Access
Research faculty may sponsor ORION users if they have a sponsor account with the CRC.  Individuals who want to access ORION resources should apply for accounts, requesting the ORION service and selecting their faculty sponsor.  Please visit the CRC Account Application page to apply for a faculty sponsorship account or for a staff/student account under a faculty sponsor.

ORION Fees

At the present time, the CRC is waiving cost recovery for the ORION service; this is subject to change.  Please see the CRC Fees page for the latest information on cost recovery for CRC services.

ORION Virtual Machine Specifications/Platform

  • ORION virtual machines offer two popular Linux distributions:  Rocky and Ubuntu.  Please note these are free distributions without commercial support.  CRC will maintain current long term service (LTS) releases for these distributions but will phase out versions that are end-of-life or no longer supported.
  • ORION can host some other operating systems/distributions on a case-by-case basis, please contact us for more information
  • ORION is designed for cost effectiveness, not high availability/redundancy.  Advanced cloud features like VPCs, load balancers, and autoscaling are not implemented. 
  • Although ORION virtual machine contents and configuration will persist across reboots, virtual machine images are NOT BACKED UP!  Treat ORION VMs as volatile storage which could fail at any time.  Do not store valuable data or code directly on the VM system disk, use external storage for this; for example the Research Data Facility (RDF). 
  • By default, VMs will have private addresses, accessible only via the campus network or VPN.  Public web facing applications can be designed to run behind Rice's Netscaler service, using private ORION virtual machines as the back end; this is the preferred approach to sharing public content from ORION based web applications.  The CRC strongly advises against the use of direct public IP addresses due to security concerns.  Exceptions can be made for valid technical considerations if the researcher understands and accepts the risk.  
  • ORION virtual machines have limited local disk space (maximum of 40GB) to maintain flexibility and conserve resources
  • ORION virtual machines are lightweight, offering small, medium and large sizes.  Virtual cores map directly to physical cores; that is, there is no oversubscription of CPUs - if you request 4 cores/16 GB RAM, you reserve all those resources whether you are utilizing them or not.
VM Size # Cores  RAM (GB)
Small 2 4
Medium 4 16
Large 8 32

ORION Virtual Machines - Security and Maintenance

  • The CRC may need to perform periodic or emergency maintenance on ORION software or hardware components.  Typically, VMs can be migrated across nodes to allow for this, but we cannot guarantee continuous uptime.
  • All ORION VMs run security agents which detect vulnerabilities.  VMs also are configured to automatically take security patches, sometimes these require reboots to take effect.  We may reach out to you to coordinate reboots or warn you about security issues with your software or web applications.  
  • We may periodically request users to shut down idle VMs to save resources.  Currently, there is no charge for ORION VMs so to avoid the "tragedy of the commons", we ask you to be reasonable and not monopolize the system.  If you are not actively using your VMs, please shut them down!

Accessing the ORION web dashboard 

The ORION web dashboard,  https://orion.crc.rice.edu, provides an interface which allows you to create and manage virtual machines.  The ORION dashboard is available only from the authenticated Rice campus network or via VPN.  Once your ORION account is activated, you will use your NetID and NetID password to login to the console, where you will be able to select preconfigured virtual machine templates which will create your virtual machines.

Accessing ORION virtual machines 

Although the ORION web dashboard provides a minimal graphical VNC (Virtual Network Computing), the VNC consoles do not support cut/paste or advanced graphical capabilities.  Generally, most users will access their virtual machines remotely over the Rice network, using Secure Shell (ssh) and a public/private SSH key pair.  The process is similar for both Windows and Mac clients, but Windows systems need a few extra steps to enable the SSH key authentication agent.  Please see the links below for additional details -

Using OpenSSH from the Mac terminal with ORION virtual machines

Using OpenSSH from Windows Powershell with ORION virtual machines


Keywords:
CRC Getting started ORION 
Doc ID:
108243
Owned by:
Bryan R. in Rice U
Created:
2021-01-11
Updated:
2025-03-26
Sites:
Rice University