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MPI
HPC
MPI + high
latency
Grid
Cloud-
HPC
Cloud-
HSC
Embarrassingly
Parallel
FIGURE 11.1
Workflows and HPC/HSC systems.
11.2.1 Supporting HPC Applications in the Cloud
Traditionally, clouds have been created for business, not to support HPC.
However, these days, clouds can support some HPC workloads. Clouds are
oriented to support high-scalability computing (HSC) rather than HPC,
although with the improvement of communication performance they are
becoming a major tool for HPC. Like clusters and grids, clouds also capi-
talize on distributed resources for applications. A question could be asked
regarding what kind of HPC applications could be executed on a cloud.
An answer to this question is provided in Figure 11.1 (Mell and Grance 2009).
This figure also specifies the scope of our research in terms of workload and
HPC/HSC clouds.
Some public cloud vendors, including the Amazon's EC2 (Amazon 2012)
have provided solutions specifically designed for running HPC applications.
EC2 is an excellent example of an IaaS cloud in that computing infrastructures
such as computers, storage devices, and networks are provided to users. There
are also private and community IaaS clouds in Australia, including NeCTAR
(Kirby 2012), that provide on-demand computing resources to academics and
researchers to run HPC applications. Thus, discipline specialists now have
on-demand access to HPC facilities that they need with flexible pay-as-you-go
pricing methods. HPC clouds give users the opportunity to test and run their
parallel applications in the cloud at a price and performance level within
what would otherwise be unviable budget constraints. They also provide the
ability to scale on demand as the users' requirements change, accelerating the
discovery of new knowledge in various fields of research. Thus, clouds can
provide discipline specialists faster turnaround times on their experiments.
While the benefits of cloud computing are numerous, delivering HPC on
cloud resources is complicated. Currently, before researchers are able to fully
utilize HPC clouds, they must understand how clouds are designed. Time
must be taken to select cloud resources and enable HPC on the cloud. Selection
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