You may have already seen the news from our friends at Facebook, but just in case it passed you by, the OSU Open Source Lab (OSL) is excited to announce our newest project: Supercell. Supercell is a new on demand virtualization and continuous integration resource, made possible by a generous grant from Facebook's Open Source Team. We have created this cluster for use by open source projects who need to run software tests regularly but may not have access to the appropriate hardware or the funds to pay for outsourcing this service. Supercell will also allow projects to do manual testing to verify that a submitted patch has actually fixed the intended bug or to determine that their software package runs correctly on a particular operating system or distribution. The service will also allow projects to test their software in a large cluster using several VMs concurrently. Supercell will also provide temporary space for projects who would like to test drive new features in their code base or on their website.

Supercell: Finding your bugs before they spiral out of control

Cluster management in Supercell is done using Google's Ganeti on top of Linux KVM. We will also provide users with access to manage their own clusters using Ganeti Web Manager, a homegrown project of the OSL built using Django. We're incredibly proud that Supercell has been built using a 100% open source software stack.

You can find out more about Supercell by visiting the project FAQ. Supercell is currently in early alpha for testing purposes, but will be available for use by open source projects in Q3 2011. You can stay tuned to progress on the Supercell project by giving us feedback on how you'd like to use it and requesting to subscribe to our announcement list.

If you're looking for more detail about Supercell "under the hood", you can follow @ganetiwebmgr on Twitter. For more in-depth information, our Lead Systems Administrator/Architect, Lance Albertson has written an article about all the features in the latest release of Ganeti Web Manager, and our Lead Developer, Peter Krenesky, has blogged about the permissions system. You can also learn more about how the OSL uses Ganeti to manage our clusters on Lance's blog.