Porting HPC Applications to Grids and Clouds - Cloud, Grid and High Performance Computing: Emerging Applications - page 30

One example of an early innovative Cloud
system came from Sun Microsystems when in
2005 it truly built its SunGrid (Sun 2010) from
scratch, based on the early vision that the network
is the computer. As with other early technologies
in the past, Sun paid a high price for being first
and doing all the experiments and the evangeliza-
tion. Its successor, Sun Network.com (Sun 2010),
was popular among its few die-hard clients. This
is because of an easy-to use technology (Grid
Engine, Jini, JavaSpaces), but it's especially
because of their innovative early users, such as
CDO 2 (2008), a provider of innovative pricing
and risk technology for organizations trading
structured credit products.
It is interesting to observe how some of the
earlier differences between Grids and clouds are
fading away. While in the beginning of the Grid
era, many Grid infrastructure prototypes were
built and disappeared after a while, today we see
many production Grids providing infrastructure,
platform, and software services (almost) on de-
mand, similar to the clouds, especially from an
end-user point of view. One good example is the
DEISA e-Infrastructure discussed in Chapter 5
above, with its DECI- DEISA Extreme Computing
Initiative. Why is DECI currently so successful
in offering millions of supercomputing cycles to
the European e-Science community and helping
scientists gain new scientific insights? Several
reasons, in my opinion: because DEISA has a
very targeted focus on specific (long-running)
supercomputing applications and most of the
applications just run on one - best-suited - sys-
tem; because of its user-friendly access - through
technology like DESHL (2008) and UNICORE
(2008); because of staying away from those more
ambitious general-purpose Grid efforts aiming
at providing everything to everybody; because
of its coordinating function which leaves the
consortium partners (the 14 largest European
supercomputer centers) fully independent; and -
similar to network.com in the past - because of
ATASKF (DECI, 2010), the application task force,

consisting of application experts who help the us-
ers with porting their applications to the DEISA
infrastructure. Because of the benefits of DEISA,
the PRACE Consortium (PRACE, 2008) decided
in 2010 to incorporate the DEISA Infrastructure
into PRACE and provide access to the PRACE
Petaflops systems via DEISA.
With this sea-change ahead of us, there will
be a continuous strategic importance for sciences
and businesses to support the work of the Open
Grid Forum (OGF, 2008). Because only standards
- recently also for clouds (OCCI, 2010) - will
enable building e-infrastructures and grid- and
cloud-enabled applications easily from different
technology components and to transition towards
an agile platform for federated services. Standards,
developed in OGF, guarantee interoperation of dif-
ferent Grid and cloud components best suited for
HPC applications, and thus reducing dependency
from proprietary building blocks and services,
keeping cost under control, and increasing research
and business flexibility.

CLOUD CASE STUDIES: HPC
APPLICATIONS ON AMAZON

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Amazon's
cloud computing platform, with Amazon Elastic
Compute Cloud (EC2) as its central part, first an-
nounced as beta in August 2006. Users can rent
Virtual Machines (VMs) on which they run their
applications. EC2 allows scalable deployment of
applications by providing a web service through
which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image
(AMI) to create a virtual machine, which Ama-
zon calls an “instance”, containing any software
desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate
server instances as needed and paying by the hour
for active servers. EC2 provides users with control
over the geographical location of instances which
allows for latency optimization and high levels
of redundancy.