HPC in the Cloud: An Intelligent Public Cloud for HPC

Dedicated to Covering Enterprise & Scientific Large Scale Cloud Computing

HPC in the Cloud >> Features

July 27, 2010

An Intelligent Public Cloud for HPC

Adaptive Computing Shares News of Cluster Compute Involvement

Nicole Hemsoth

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

When the news about Amazon’s new instance type for EC2 called Cluster Compute Instances (CCI) emerged, the official statement indicated the cooperation of a few companies, including Cycle Computing and RightScale, although the details of their involvement were not immediately clear. This morning one of the cloud services vendors noted in the announcement, Adaptive Computing, issued a release detailing some of its contributions to Amazon’s HPC instance type, along with some details about their process of testing the performance of the public cloud.

There has been no word from Amazon about how it selected its partners as much as a year in advance of the official CCI announcement, but Adaptive does provide a way to maximize public and private cloud utilization, which would certainly explain Amazon’s interest in the relatively small company. While they are small, they have been involved in some of the largest-scale HPC and HPC cloud deployments. Adaptive Computing specifically targets the HPC market with its array of policy-driven automation offerings based on Moab technology. This technology ensures that resources in the cloud can be utilized as efficiently as possible and according to the policies that govern resource usage and might help make the public cloud more "intelligent".

President of Adaptive Computing, Michael Jackson, remarked on the fact that until Cluster Compute Instances became available many of their customers were disappointed with the performance of HPC capabilities in the public cloud but that this offering does offer some more viable alternatives for these customers. Jackson commented that following their tests, they saw the possibility for a whole new class of HPC users to enter into the space, which is quite good news for a company that is directly aligned with this market segment—a segment that is growing very quickly, according to research group IDC, among others.

Testing the Intelligent HPC Cloud

One of the more compelling aspects of the Adaptive announcement today were the statements about Adaptive’s testing of Amazon’s new HPC cloud environment. Since this is a new and relatively untested (widely and publicly) instance type, hearing more about the performance levels, even if it was coming from the perspective of a firm whose best interest it is to extol the virtue of this public cloud, was at least informative.

Following what it called “extensive testing” Adaptive Computing declared that the new Amazon Cluster Compute Instances as “robust, reliable and capable of delivering the compute power, bandwidth and low latency required by HPC class applications. Adaptive’s VP of marketing, Peter ffoulkes, described some of the company’s perceptions following the testing they conducted to determine the performance of Amazon’s new HPC offering:

Amazon’s press release referenced one of our customers NERSC, stating that “we found our HPC applications ran 8.5 times faster on Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2 than the previous EC2 instance types.” That is quite a reasonable endorsement, although they didn’t make any comparisons (that I have seen)to their own internal HPC systems.

The Intel Nehalem based systems the Amazon CCI capability is based on have been a platform of choice for many HPC facilities implementing x86 HPC systems. From the network perspective, not all HPC applications require low latency, but the “10gigE” network is no slouch. It is less expensive to implement than Infiniband and several informed sources (one being Jeff Birnbaum of Bank of America, talking about latency at the High Perormance Linux for Financial Markets event last April) opined that although 10GbE is not as good as Infiniband it’s close.

In terms of their own contribution to the functionality of the new instance type, Adaptive stated that “Moab technology ensures that cloud resources can be utilized with up to ninety-nine percent efficiency and, when combined with Amazon’s EC2 Cluster Compute Instance environment, creates a dynamic and intelligent environment that offers excellent value and return on investment in HPC cloud resources.”

A Seachange for HPC or a Small Wave?

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPC in the Cloud

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Content Type

Around the Web

Application Flexibility and the New Enterprise Architecture

Aug 31 | Application delivery strategies must be shaped with flexibility in mind as the number of platforms delivering core applications is bound to change with time. Since a greater number of devices and platforms are entering the infrastructure mix, those who do not adapt quickly face being locked into strategies that do not mesh well with new developments. Read more...

A Maturation Stage for Storage Virtualization

Aug 27 | Storage virtualization has been gaining momentum as it moves from concept to practice but some suggest the offerings in this realm have not matured sufficiently and require a longer maturation process before wider adoption occurs. Read more...

HP Seeks to Boost Cloud Service Automation Capability

Aug 27 | Although it was lost in the chaos of the 3PAR bidding war between, HP announced news that it acquired cloud service automation firm Stratavia to bolster its cloud management offering and further its strategy in the arena. Read more...

NASA CIO Weighs in on Nebula, Public Clouds

Aug 26 | In an interview from the NASA IT Summit last week, the agency's CIO, Linda Cureton weighs in on developments with Nebula platform and the adoption of the open source code by other agencies looking to the cloud. Read more...

Facing the Realities of Private Cloud Building

Aug 24 | While private clouds are getting far more attention than they received at the beginning of the cloud buzz boom, the realities of the complexities of actual building them--not to mention the financial and time investments--are often overlooked. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Increase IT Performance from the Enterprise to the Cloud with WAN Optimization

Aug 30 | | Enterprises face a paradox today: while workers become increasingly distributed, IT infrastructure is rapidly consolidating. Virtualization has made it possible to create consolidated, elastic pools.

Grid Computing in the Cloud White Paper

May 14 | | Empower business users, scientists and researchers with their own grid computing infrastructure in the cloud.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Storm Clouds - Security Issues in the Cloud and How to Address Them

This Webinar will highlight the four critical areas of concern when securing cloud infrastructure services and managed enterprise applications.

Webcast: Confronting HPC Cloud Computing Security Concerns

Escalating energy and operational costs of building and maintaining data centers are forcing enterprises to adopt cloud computing models. But are Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions like IBM's Computing on Demand (CoD) really cost effective? Join the discussion as industry experts discuss how you can exploit cloud computing for maximum ROI.