Case Study: Argonne National Laboratory achieves scalable, high-performance cloud for scientific research with OpenStack

Building High Performance Clouds

Argonne National Laboratory’s DOE-funded Magellan project set out to test whether commodity cloud platforms could support technical and scientific computing at scale. The team ran into scalability and stability problems with an early EC2-style stack—failures began around 100 nodes while their target was roughly 700—creating a need for a more robust cloud software stack and better network and storage performance.

Argonne migrated Magellan to OpenStack (Nova, Horizon, Keystone, Glance) and built a ~750‑node private cloud (500 compute, 200 storage, large-memory and management nodes), moving the system from testbed to production. The platform boosted researcher productivity for prototyping and bioinformatics, supported near‑line WAN transfers (99 Gbps demonstrated), delivered >2 GB/s per storage server (targeting ~12.5 GB/s aggregate), and is now used by thousands of scientists as the team continues tuning performance.

Argonne National Laboratory

Narayan Desai

Technical lead