High Performance Computing with cloud

Xu Tong

About the topic

• Why HPC(high performance computing) used on cloud

• What’s the difference between cloud and traditional HPC environments

Cloud Computing

• The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand

• The elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users

• The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed and release them as needed

High Performance Computing

• A branch of computer science that concentrates on developing supercomputers and software to run on supercomputers. A main area of this discipline is developing parallel processing algorithms and software: programs that can be divided into little pieces so that each piece can be executed simultaneously by separate processors.

High Performance Computing with Clouds

• When demand for a service varies with time

• When demand is unknown in advance

• When performing batch analytics

Amazon’s EC2

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a central part of Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

HPC Benchmark

• In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it.

HPC Benchmark

• HPC Benchmark is a set of benchmarks targeting to test multiple attributes that can contribute substantially to the real-world performance of HPC systems.

• HPL, STREAM, RandomAccess, PTRANS, FFTE, DGEMM and b_eff Latency/Bandwidth

Amazon EC2

• One EC2 Compute Unit provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor

• A set of three standard instances called ml.small, ml.large and ml.xlarge

• A pair of high cpu instances called cl.medium and cl.xlarge

Benchmark test to EC2

Benchmark test to EC2

Benchmark test to EC2

Benchmark test to EC2

MPI

• The Message Passing Interface(MPI) is a standardized and portable message-passing system designed by a group of researchers from academia and industry to function on a wide variety of parallel computers

MPI on EC2

NCSA

• NCSA(National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyber infrastructure that advances science and engineering

• An HPC cluster of NCSA called Abe

Benchmark test 2 to EC2

Benchmark test 2 to EC2

Benchmark test 2 to EC2

Benchmark test 2 to EC2

Benchmark test 2 to EC2

Penguin computing on Demand

• Penguin computing on Demand(POD) is a true high-performance computing cluster in the cloud available for your use. Through dedicated login nodes POD provides a persistent Linux environment that includes a complete HPC software stack and is directly connected to a compute cluster for job execution.

• http://www.penguincomputing.com/

POD vs. EC2

POD vs. EC2

POD vs. EC2

Conclusions

• EC2 was satisfying with smaller HPC applications, but there still has the performance gap between clouds and traditional HPC environment

• For the money reason the clouds are excellent alternative to traditional HPC

• POD provide HPC as a service by optimizing cloud service specifically for HPC, it is better than EC2

Conclusions

• HPC with clouds is a new trend that can bring cost effective HPC business solutions for a lot of companies and also there are scopes for improvement for cloud services