Raphael Leplae

Background

About Raphael Leplae

The Pôle Technologies is part of the ULB Informatics Department and is composed of 18 members. I took the lead of this new unit in late 2021, which was created by merging different historical IT teams. Combining heterogenous activities, projects, operations, user support and other activities related to administrative, educational and scientific fields has been a hefty challenge, and still in progress. The main responsibilities of the Pôle Technologies are: Datacentres: We manage one legacy DC of 200 kW capacity, plus several small computer rooms distributed over the campuses. We are conducting as well a project for the construction of a new and modern DC of 250 kW capacity which will be close to the Tier-3 level. In parallel, we are developing an EdgeComputing environment to host an hyperconverged IT infrastructure over an SDN. Networks: ULB is composed of four main campuses redundantly interconnected, plus some other satellite sites. In total, the user network features more than one hundred routers, around 400 switches, 15 user network links and 1 600 Wi-Fi hotspots. IT infrastructures We are (still) conducting modernisation works, including the decommissioning of legacy IT systems. Services are moved/deployed on our newly home-made hyperconverged IT infrastructure, called Hyperion. In two years, we reached 2 cores and 5 PB of raw storage, deployed as a SDS, and we expect to double the size over the next 2 years. IT platforms: In the same modernisation process, we rationalised the use of our hosting platforms, targeting only three major ones : OpenShift for institutional services, ProxMox for virtual machines and Kubernetes + Rancher for research needs. In parallel, we accelerate the pace towards the Cloud, via SAAS, PAAS or IAAS solutions on a case-by-case basis. Scientific computing: ULB is part of the CECI and in that context we are preparing the installation of our new HTC and HPDA cluster. This new cluster will feature compute nodes with many single precision GPUs and therefore focused AI/ML workloads. IT services: The Pôle Technologies is a major contributor of the Informatics Department Service Catalogue. We design, deploy and maintain key services offered to the entire ULB community (more than 5 personnel members and more than 40 students). Paid services are provided too, answering needs going beyond our default offer.