Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Porting HPC Applications
to Grids and Clouds
Wolfgang Gentzsch
Independent HPC, Grid, and Cloud Consultant, Germany
ABSTRACT
A Grid enables remote, secure access to a set of distributed, networked computing and data resources.
Clouds are a natural complement to Grids towards the provisioning of IT as a service. To “Grid-enable”
applications, users have to cope with: complexity of Grid infrastructure; heterogeneous compute and
data nodes; wide spectrum of Grid middleware tools and services; the e-science application architec-
tures, algorithms and programs. For clouds, on the other hand, users don't have many possibilities to
adjust their application to an underlying cloud architecture, because of its transparency to the user.
Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to guide users through the important stages of implementing HPC
applications on Grid and cloud infrastructures, together with a discussion of important challenges and
their potential solutions. As a case study for Grids, we present the Distributed European Infrastructure
for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) and describe the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative (DECI)
for porting and running scientific grand challenge applications on the DEISA Grid. For clouds, we pres-
ent several case studies of HPC applications running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 and its
recent Cluster Compute Instances for HPC. This chapter concludes with the author's top ten rules of
building sustainable Grid and cloud e-infrastructures.
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