April 30 -- SARA is developing a High Performance Compute Cloud for the scientific community, funded by BiG Grid. Currently this HPC Cloud is offered in beta to a selected group of scientific users for evaluation purposes. Members of the Dutch scientific community are invited to apply for evaluation use of the HPC Cloud.

With this newly-developed High Performance Computing (HPC) Cloud, environment researchers are provided with access to their own Virtual Private HPC Cluster. It is a virtualized HPC Cluster that can be configured to exactly match their needs, without interfering with the needs of other users. It is flexible, offers self service and is dynamically scalable.

Users can start from existing templates (images), or build their own cluster from scratch. It is even possible to make a copy from their current software environment (for example their laptop or desktop pc) and turn that into a HPC cluster in the Cloud. In that way, there will hardly be any difference between their development environment and their production environment. There is no need for an (expensive) rewrite of their software, and scientific challenges can be scaled up very easily from desktop scale to high performance compute cluster scale.

When you wish to participate in this beta phase and want to make use of the developed service, you are welcomed to submit a short proposal to claudia-support@sara.nl before midnight, May 12, 2010. Procedures and details are specified below.

Proposals (250-500 words) should consist of:

• A short description of your project objectives.
• A project planning in weeks.
• Estimate of your desired compute hours.
• Estimate of the storage requirements.

What can be applied for?

• Applicants will obtain access to the HPC Cloud.
• The ability to submit and start your own virtual machines.
• Manage and configure your own submitted virtual machines.
• Use existing templates, upload your own or configure from scratch with free choice of operating system and applications.
• Access to the virtual machines can be through console, ssh and over public_ip.

What is expected of successful applicants?

• An entrepreneurial spirit and open mindedness, because of the beta status of this service.
• A written evaluation report on your experiences (1-2 pages).
• Participation in a planned workshop in September.

These and additional details can be found at https://grid.sara.nl/wiki/index.php/Using_the_HPC_Cloud/betaevaluation.

The SARA support team will actively support the implementation of your planned activities. They are especially interested in applications which are difficult or near impossible to run on the existing HPC platforms (Huygens, Lisa, Grid), but do run in your local environment.

In this beta phase we strive to offer a full production grade environment, but we are however continuously improving the technical environment as well as the ways of working. This may have consequences on stability and availability.

We are looking forward to your proposals and ideas.

Mail: claudia-support@sara.nl

Phone: +31 6.533.919.31

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Source: SARA HPC Cloud Support Team