August 29, 2012
At this year's SRII Global Conference 2012, organized by the Service Research and Innovation Institute which aims at "Driving Research & Innovation for IT Enabled Services for a Better World," I put together a panel about High Performance Technical Computing as a Service, HPCaaS, called "HPC as a Service – Key to Mainstream HPC or Wishful Thinking?"
This panel was inspired by the perception that on one hand HPC provides huge benefits to the industry, and especially to small- and medium enterprises (SMEs) with a focus on digital manufacturing (sometimes called the 'missing middle'), but on the other hand comes with a number of significant barriers preventing its wider adoption. The panelists – which represented the main stakeholders (SME, HPC Center, HPC Cloud, ISV, and HPC Expert) – investigated how especially HPC as a Service is able to remove these barriers.
The main conclusion from the panelists' statements and discussion is that there are indeed more severe barriers for HPC in the Cloud than with mainstream cloud computing, simply because of the significant difference of the applications – Web services versus big simulation jobs – and all that implies. But with careful analysis of each HPC application's requirements and setting up the perfect team of industrial end-user, resource provider, ISV, and HPC expert, most of the challenges can be removed, a proposal that is currently explored in the Uber-Cloud Experiment and will be further discussed at the ISC Cloud conference in September. Thus, there is strong indication that HPC as a Service is becoming widely recognized as a key to mainstream HPC.
Please see the detailed article about this panel at http://www.digitalmanufacturingreport.com/dmr/2012-08-28/hpc_as_a_service_–_key_to_mainstream_hpc_or_wishful_thinking_.html.
Researchers from the Suddhananda Engineering and Research Centre in Bhubaneswar, India developed a job scheduling system, which they call Service Level Agreement (SLA) scheduling, that is meant to achieve acceptable methods of resource provisioning similar to that of potential in-house systems. They combined that with an on-demand resource provisioner to ensure utilization optimization of virtual machines.
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Experimental scientific HPC applications are continually being moved to the cloud, as covered here in several capacities over the last couple of weeks. Included in that rundown, Co-founder and CEO of CloudSigma Robert Jenkins penned an article for HPC in the Cloud where he discussed the emergence of cloud technologies to supplement research capabilities of big scientific initiatives like CERN and ESA (the European Space Agency)...
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When considering moving excess or experimental HPC applications to a cloud environment, there will always be obstacles. Were that not the case, the cost effectiveness of cloud-based HPC would rule the high performance landscape. Jonathan Stewart Ward and Adam Barker of the University of St. Andrews produced an intriguing report on the state of cloud computing, paying a significant amount of attention to the problems facing cloud computing.
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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.