HPC in the Cloud: When HPC Becomes a Service: The POD Example

Dedicated to covering high-end cloud computing
in science, industry and the datacenter

Translation Disclaimer

Subscribe | Sign In

Blog: Live from ISC '10

June 01, 2010

When HPC Becomes a Service: The POD Example

It might have been difficult a number of years ago to imagine offering HPC as a Service but we’re now living in the era of everything-as-a-service, so why should high performance computing be exempt? As enterprise and research institutions see the need for dramatic compute resource needs that don’t require the maintenance of a cluster, the cloud is a hot topic—and for good reason. Even with all of the discussions about security (many of which seem nebulous and refer to security as an overarching, non-specific concern) the move to the cloud becomes something of a no-brainer, particularly because budgets require the scalability and cost flexibility that cloud provides.

If you were to do a search about HPC as a service, one of your first results would be the trademark owner of that idea—Penguin Computing. The company’s on-demand offering, called POD, has gained some significant traction in academia, manufacturing and aerospace and, like many other long-time players in the HPC space, the company had a booth at ISC. I sat down with Penguin Computing’s manager of software development to discuss the concept of HPC as a service and the cloud in general as well as to get some insights about POD and its uses and applications. In this case, the discussion is in the context of a biosciences firm, Life Technologies, who has made use of POD in the same way that other life sciences companies are utilizing similar offerings from other vendors as will be addressed in later updates from the ISC floor.

While there are other companies offering roughly the same service that Penguin Computing does, it was worthwhile to hear about some of the end user experiences to get an idea of who is looking beyond an in-house solution in order to save the time and management difficulties of having an on-site cluster for occasional or non-maximized use. Since HPC as a service is inherently scalable, it stands to reason that those who would be making the most use out of a service like POD would be research institutions and industry sectors that require big data processing, but in unexpected loads, bursts, or cycles that might be otherwise hard to predict or invest in for occasional use.

At ISC this year, Penguin Computing and other cloud offering vendors who’ve been willing to talk details about their end users are consistently talking about bioscience, R&D, and financial services—in that order. One of the reasons the cloud calls to these sectors is because the need for large-scale crunching, if planned on the basis of anticipated maximum need, would not only be wasteful of compute resources, but incredibly expensive.

Posted by Nicole Hemsoth - June 01, 2010 @ 6:09 AM, Pacific Daylight Time

Subscribe to HPC in the Cloud

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in join the Discussion

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Content Type

Subscribe to All Content

All

Nicole Hemsoth

Nicole Hemsoth is the managing editor of HPC in the Cloud and will discuss a range of overarching issues related to HPC-specific cloud topics in posts.

More Nicole Hemsoth

Feature Articles

Cloud Services Satisfy a Higher Calling

Higher education involves many collaborative projects that lend themselves to cloud services, however often those services are not tailored to the uniqueness of an academic environment. That's where the Internet2 NET+ project comes in. By partnering with 16 major cloud providers, the networking consortium is seeking to expedite the delivery of cloud services and by doing so advance research and innovation in the United States.
Read more...

Read more HPC in the Cloud features...

Around the Web

NVIDIA Raises Its Game to the Cloud

May 17, 2012 | NVIDIA GeForce GRID, a cloud gaming platform announced at the 2012 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), seeks to reduce the the latency associated with cloud gaming.
Read more...

Breaking the Cloud Barrier

May 15, 2012 | New Microsoft report shows that beyond the expected financial benefits, cloud services may offer more comprehensive security features compared to in-house IT operations.
Read more...

Vendors Demo Next-Gen Sequencing Platforms for Pharma

May 14, 2012 | During the second annual Pistoia Alliance conference, three teams demonstrated their newly-implemented cloud-based next-generation sequencing platforms.
Read more...

Zunicore Offers Bare Metal by the Hour

May 10, 2012 | PEER1's cloud division, Zunicore, will soon be offering GPU-equipped servers on-demand.
Read more...

US Cloud Providers Struggle With Data Privacy Laws

May 08, 2012 | The Patriot Act leads foreign governments to question the security of US cloud services.
Read more...

Read more headlines...

Appro White Paper: Enabling Performance-per-Watt Gains in HPC

04/05/2012 | Appro | Designed to meet the growing global demand for HPC solutions, Appro's Xtreme-X™ Supercomputer delivers superior performance-per-watt and reduced I/O latency while bringing significant flexibility to HPC workload configurations including capacity, hybrid, data intensive and capability computing.

Exploring the Potential of Heterogeneous Computing

04/02/2012 | AMD | Developers today are just beginning to explore the potential of heterogeneous computing, but the potential for this new paradigm is huge. This brief article reviews how the technology might impact a range of application development areas, including client experiences and cloud-based data management. As platforms like OpenCL continue to evolve, the benefits of heterogeneous computing will become even more accessible. Use this quick article to jump-start your own thinking on heterogeneous computing.