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Tortuga allows you to create and resize High Performance Computing clusters on demand and it supports so called 'cloud bursting' in hybrid cloud scenarios. Tortuga is tightly integrated with Univa Grid Engine to deliver ready-to-use clusters including workload and resource management.

Tortuga supports so called "kits" that augment the set of software Tortuga can install as well as the target infrastructures onto which Tortuga can deploy. Kits are installable packages with metadata. Open source kits for Tortuga can be found under https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga-kit-*. The Univa Grid Engine integration is implemented as a kit as well. The "cloud resource adapters" are also kits and Tortuga currently supports the following cloud/virtualization platforms:

• Amazon AWS (https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga-kit-awsadapter)
• Google Cloud Platform (https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga-kit-gceadapter)
• Microsoft Azure (https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga-kit-azureadapter)
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga-kit-oraclecloudadapter)
• OpenStack (https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga-kit-openstackadapter)
• VMware vSphere 5.x (https://github.com/UnivaCorporation/tortuga-kit-vmwareadapter)
• On-premise (physical) nodes (built-in)

Key features of Tortuga are:

• Multi-cloud support: a cluster can consist of resources from any cloud and resources from multiple clouds can even be used in a single cluster at the same time
• Reusable, interoperable components: configuration specifics for hardware and software get embedded in template-based profiles that can be reused and combined
• Automated configuration: cluster nodes are deployed to specification by leveraging Puppet for configuration management and deployment orchestration
• Cloud on-demand: Scaling up and down of cloud-based infrastructures happens dynamically dependent on workload demand and through use of a flexible rules engine that captures the specifics of cloud use cases
• Compatible with standard services: Tortuga integrates with and can configure standard services such as networking, VPNs, name resolution, identity management, cloud storage, and security

For a developer level introduction with instructions on how to build Tortuga please refer to Developer information.

To try Tortuga with Univa Grid Engine, you will need the Univa Grid Engine Trial Kit which can be downloaded and used for free. Installation instructions for the Univa Grid Engine Kit are available here. You should refer to the Tortuga documentation in addition.

If you are interested in using Tortuga in production and you require support or add-ons then Univa is providing a productized version of Tortuga under the name Navops Launch together with support options, services and integrated products.

The Tortuga Installation and Administration Guide (in Markdown format) is available in the doc subdirectory.

See the Building documentation section below for instructions on creating a PDF file.

Tortuga documentation is provided in Markdown format which can be easily converted to PDF using Pandoc.

On RHEL/CentOS 7, pandoc can be installed as follows:

yum install pandoc texlive-xetex texlive-collection-xetex \
    texlive-collection-latexrecommended

After installing pandoc and XeLaTeX packages, the PDF file can be generated as follows:

pandoc -f markdown -o tortuga-7-admin-guide.pdf \
    -V margin-left=0.5in -V margin-right=0.5in \
    -V margin-top=1in -V margin-bottom=1in \
    --toc \
    --latex-engine xelatex \
    --template tortuga-template.tex \
    --smart --listings \
    --variable papersize=letter \
    doc/tortuga-7-admin-guide.md.raw

Tortuga runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS version 6 or 7 (7 is preferred). Installation packages for it can be built on most Linux modern distributions or macOS.

Python 3.6 or higher is required and can be installed from The Software Collections (SCL) repository.

yum install centos-release-scl

On Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the rh-python36 package is made available through the RHSCL channel:

yum-config-manager --enable rhel-server-rhscl-7-rpms

Use the following yum-config-manager invocation if running the official RHEL AMI on AWS:

yum-config-manager --enable rhui-REGION-rhel-server-rhscl

After installing the SCL package repository, run the following command to install Python 3.

yum install rh-python36

After installing rh-python36, source the environment to add python3 to the system PATH:

. /opt/rh/rh-python36/enable

Puppet 5.x is also required to build the Puppet modules used by Tortuga. It can be installed on RHEL/CentOS by installing the distribution version specific YUM repository package puppet5-release from http://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppet5 and then installing the puppet-agent package.

Installing puppet5-release on RHEL/CentOS 7:

rpm -ivh http://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppet5/puppet5-release-el-7.noarch.rpm
yum install -y puppet-agent

This installs the Puppet suite of packages under /opt/puppetlabs.

Puppet 5 is also available on Homebrew for macOS users as puppet-agent cask or it is downloadable directly from Puppet.

Independent of the method of installation, be sure you add /opt/puppetlabs/bin to your binary search path in $PATH, e.g. via reloading the shell by running exec -l $SHELL.

Assuming the Python 3.x environment has been sourced, run the following to build the base Tortuga installation:

git clone git@github.com:UnivaCorporation/tortuga.git
cd tortuga
python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
paver build

The resultant distribution tarball can be found in the dist folder. Refer to the Tortuga Installation and Administration Guide (found in the doc folder in this source repository) for guidance on how to install and configure Tortuga.