Since its first announcement on June 28, and its official start on July 20, the Uber-Cloud Experiment has attracted over 160 industry and research organizations and individuals from 22 countries. They all share one goal: to jointly explore the end-to-end process of remotely accessing technical computing resources sitting in HPC centers and in the cloud. The focus of this experiment is on engineering simulations performed by small and medium enterprises that expect a quantum leap in innovation and competitiveness by using HPC.

The benefits of remote access to HPC are widely recognized. We have technology that allows us to access and run engineering workloads on remote resources, for example, but we still face other challenges related to the human element. Examples of this include trusting the resource provider; giving away some control over our applications, data, and resources; security; provider lock-in; software licensing; unfamiliar pay-per-use computing models; and a general lack of clarity in distinguishing between hype and reality. To explore these hurdles in detail and to learn more about this end-to-end process, we were able to build the following 20 teams: Anchor Bolt, Resonance, Radiofrequency, Supersonic, Liquid-Gas, Wing-Flow, Ship-Hull, Cement-Flows, Sprinkler, Space Capsule, Car Acoustics, Dosimetry, Weathermen, Wind Turbine, Combustion, Blood Flow, ChinaCFD, Gas Bubbles, Side impact, and ColombiaBio.

During the half-time webinar we asked the attendees if they wished to participate in a second round of the Uber-Cloud Experiment, and 97% answered in the affirmative. Therefore, we decided to start a new round of the Uber-Cloud Experiment right after the end of the current round, running from mid-November to mid-February.

The full report, available on HPCwire, provides additional information about the different teams, two engineering use cases, and further details on Round 2. Registration for Round 2 can be accessed from the Uber-Cloud Experiment website.