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Introduction

STFC's Azimuth platform is powered by Azimuth, a self-service portal for managing cloud resources with a particular focus on simplifying the use of cloud for scientific computing, high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Azimuth Dashboard

If this is your first visit to the Azimuth portal, or you would just like to know more about how to get access to a cloud project - get started with Azimuth science platforms.

Disclaimer

  • The STFC Cloud Azimuth platform is still in development, therefore data loss could occur, and it is recommended that no data be stored on there that you do not wish to lose.
  • Updates/patches of the platform may come at short notice, but we endeavour to give 1 weeks notice.
  • Support for Azimuth related issues is only offered during regular working hours, with no out of hours support currently being offered.
  • For any issues for feedback please contact us via STFC Cloud Support: cloud-support@stfc.ac.uk
  • Please read the STFC Cloud Azimuth Platform SLA before use: [Link]

Getting Started

Accessing Azimuth

Azimuth can be accessed here: https://portal.apps.cape.stfc.ac.uk

Access to an STFC Cloud OpenStack project is required for usage of Azimuth.

You log in as you would normally to the STFC Cloud OpenStack interface, using FedID or IAM authentication (IRIS-IAM, or SKA-IAM). This will then take you to a screen where you select which of your projects you want to work in.

A cloud project (or cloud tenancy) is an organizational unit in the cloud to which users are assigned. Users can be members of one or more projects.

Cloud resources belong to a project and not a user. This means that all resources within a project are visible and editable by members of the project.

To be allocated a cloud project, or if you are unable to access an existing project when logging in with FedID or IAM as you usually would for OpenStack, please contact cloud support or your project coordinator.

Other users can be granted access to every or individual platforms and services deployed on Azimuth, without having access to the Azimuth management dashboard itself, through the Identity Provider.

Platforms

Platforms can be deployed directly from the Azimuth Platforms interface:

Azimuth Platforms

Kubernetes

A fully-featured Kubernetes container orchestration cluster.

Kubernetes Applications

Kubernetes Applications require an existing Kubernetes cluster before they can be deployed.

JupyterHub

A multi-user JupyterHub on Kubernetes, powered by zero-to-jupyterhub.

DaskHub

A multi-user DaskHub on Kubernetes. Dask is a flexible library for parallel computing in Python.

ArgoCD

ArgoCD provides a declarative GitOps Continuous Delivery (CD) platform for Kubernetes clusters.

BinderHub

BinderHub allows a reproducible set of Jupyter notebooks to be deployed onto a JupyterHub deployment on a Kubernetes cluster.

HuggingFace-LLM

A generative AI chatbot service backed by a HuggingFace model, exposed via a convenient web interface.

KubeFlow

KubeFlow is a machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes clusters, using Jupyter Notebooks and TensorFlow.