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Who do you think should win the 2025 Superuser Awards? The annual Superuser Awards are to recognize organizations that have used open infrastructure to improve their business while contributing back to the community.
This year, the Superuser Awards winner will be announced at the OpenInfra Summit Europe, October 17-19! Join us at the annual OpenInfra Summit for an opportunity to collaborate directly with the international community of people building and running open source infrastructure using Linux, StarlingX, OpenStack, Kubernetes, Kata Containers and 30+ other technologies. Get your Summit tickets now!
StackHPC is one of the 3 nominees for the Superuser Awards 2025. Check out why its team is getting nominated:
Who is the nominee?
StackHPC – an open source consultancy specialising in open source cloud infrastructure for research computing, HPC and AI. StackHPC is a small team, with an engineering group of about 28 team members.
How has open infrastructure transformed the organization’s business?
The question is more about how StackHPC has used open infrastructure to transform the business of other organisations! As a specialist open source consultancy, StackHPC is proud to have participated in open infrastructure projects with some of the most prominent scientific institutions around the world.
How has the organization participated in or contributed to an open source project?
According to Stackalytics, StackHPC is one of the most significant contributors to recent OpenStack releases!
The company also makes contributions to Ceph, Ansible, OVN, Linux kernel, Kubernetes and supporting open source projects.
Within OpenStack, StackHPC is proud to include four current or previous PTLs within the engineering team. StackHPC’s CTO, Stig Telfer, is one of the co-founders of the OpenStack Scientific SIG.
What open source technologies does the organization use in its open infrastructure environment?
StackHPC’s open infra technology mix includes:
- OpenStack
- Kolla/Kolla-Ansible/Kayobe
- Ceph
- Linux
- Azimuth
- Slurm
- Kubernetes
- Kubernetes Cloud Provider OpenStack
- Open Virtual Networking (OVN)
- Helm
- OpenHPC
- European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI)
- Waldur
What is the scale of your open infrastructure environment?
Our principal infrastructure is the Scalable Metal Service – approximately 30 servers hosted in Iceland, created with the purpose of supporting open source projects with CI, infrastructure and training labs. We will be using SMS for hands-on training at OpenInfra Summit Europe!
What kind of operational challenges have you overcome during your experience with open infrastructure?
We support clients with large-scale and challenging open infrastructure projects, including high-performance computing use cases that push the boundaries of cloud infrastructure performance.
Smooth upgrades on hard-working infrastructure is always a challenge, and StackHPC has made many contributions to the Kolla-Ansible project to minimise upgrade disruption and improve the resilience of the upgrade processes.
How is this team innovating with open infrastructure?
StackHPC’s work supports OpenStack’s use in new ways and in new verticals.
- Azimuth cloud portal builds on OpenStack infrastructure and provides scientists with an intuitive portal for provisioning and management of compute platforms for research – https://azimuth-cloud.github.io/azimuth-user-docs/
- New/improved functionalities contributed upstream, such as better message queue handling: for example – https://www.stackhpc.com/quorum-in-the-warren.html
- Sharing knowledge for the benefit of the open infrastructure community such as information on virtual GPU management: https://www.stackhpc.com/democratising-the-gpu-part-1.html
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