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ArmoniK Newsletter
October 2023
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ArmoniK latest news
Welcome to the first ArmoniK Newsletter
ArmoniK is the only modern open-source orchestrator able to manage the distribution of huge graphs of computation tasks on premises and in the cloud for massive simulations in Finance, Healthcare and Industry.
Our aim with this communication is to regularly inform all the community of people interested in ArmoniK on the adoption of the product, the new features and some technical aspects. We hope actual users, prospects, cloud partners, HPC/HTC specialists and academics will find interesting news here.
Looking back at the decision to launch ArmoniK at the end of 2020, a long way has already been covered. The 18 years of ANEO R&D allowed us to build this open-source solution in 18 months through a CA-CIB & AWS partnership. First usage in production at CA-CIB now dates back to July 2022, with smooth production stability since then and excellent performances. The replacements of the two old-dated commercial solutions are in good shape. Our support team is now up and running. And we are awaiting the first community contribution before the end of the year.
News
Let’s start with some news from Crédit Agricole CIB.
ArmoniK went live on Global Markets in July 2022 to replace IBM Symphony and in October 2022 on Equities to replace TibCo DataSynapse. Since then, end of day risk workloads are progressively migrated from the old on-premises setup to the new AWS one. Precise and secure testing procedures guide our efforts as the global deployment approaches its end.
Marcel PHAN’s teams were particularly happy to discover a very stable product: no ArmoniK production issues were detected since day one! The performances improvement of 30% are also much appreciated, thanks to ArmoniK graph feature and Linux migration.
Last but not least, bank security recommendations are regularly integrated in the new versions which are automatically deployed every month with the DevOps and InfraAsCode environment in place. The collaborative hard work of CA-CIB and ANEO’s teams during the integration pays off!
A second renowned European Bank, still under NDA, has started an in-depth evaluation of the product. We hope to disclose it in the next NewsLetter.
One of the key differentiators of ArmoniK is its native ability to orchestrate massive computations on your on-premises infrastructure or on your preferred public cloud: today exclusively and soon simultaneously. After AWS, we have conducted during the summer a Proof of Concept with GCP that gives excellent results, opening the door to performant production deployments in the coming months
Events
We are pleased to announce ANEO’s participation at SuperComputing 23 in Denver in November. This is the world’s most popular event dedicated to High Performance Computing. Let’s hope to see some of you there, whether on the AWS booth or for specific one to ones we can organize.
Performance
We are proud to announce that after extensive benchmarking on AWS, the performance of ArmoniK has been remarkable.
To be more specific, we measured:
With the knowledge gained from these tests, we have already identified ways to improve the number of tasks per second. We are currently working on these improvements and will announce our findings in a future newsletter.
For more information see here.
Technical additions
We are continuously improving ArmoniK and are providing new features regularly. Here are 3 of the most recent changes. ArmoniK can manage tasks with dependencies according to an event-based approach.
Dependent tasks can have higher priorities, allowing for lower scheduling costs when scheduling heavily dependent tasks.
Another addition is the possibility to add external queue plugins. You can now develop your own plugins for the queue system of your choice and easily integrate them with ArmoniK.
Lastly, we added support for C++ Client and Worker in addition to the existing C#, Angular, and Python. You can now interact with ArmoniK from C++ and simplify the use of your native libraries from ArmoniK.
Roadmap
Deployment on ARM platforms has been tested and will soon be officially supported. This will allow you to take advantage of AWS Graviton Instances.
Along with the SQS integration, the performance on AWS should be much better than the one presented earlier.
As mentioned earlier, a POC is underway using GCP and you can expect ArmoniK to be integrated properly with GCP’s managed services. The final target is to use Pub/Sub for the queue and GKE with autopilot for the resource allocator. Another good platform to show amazing performances in the future.
ArmoniK deployment on Windows has been tested. Development on the CI/CD is still required to allow for official support. We are waiting for an opportunity to work on this.
There are discussions with actors coming from the HPC field, to support other resource allocators such as Slurm. Soon to be seen: ArmoniK on your preferred supercomputer.