HPC PROJECTS: CLOUD COMPUTING
Looking for the silver lining
If you believe the hype, then ‘The Cloud’ will be the next big thing across all strata of computing. Stephen Mounsey asks what it can bring to the HPC party
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loud computing means many different things to many different people, with so-called ‘cloud’ offerings ranging from simple online storage services to a handful of providers of supercomputing-as- a-service, with many variations in between. While the space is poorly defined, cloud- based services are rapidly becoming an established part of the HPC hardware used by a broad spectrum of users, from science and engineering to big business.
Like a grid?
In order to pin down the definition of cloud computing as applied to HPC, it is useful to compare it to its closest cousin – grid computing. Ian Foster is director of the computation institute run by the Argonne National Laboratories and the University of Chicago, and has worked extensively on research-level computing grids. ‘The term “grid computing” is in reference to the electrical power grid,’ he notes, referring to the goal of on-demand computing analogous to the on-demand electricity supplied by national power grids. ‘On-demand computing is, of course, the same concept that underpins cloud computing.’ Grid computing came to refer to technologies for sharing resources, such as computer systems and storage systems, located at various geographical locations. ‘It’s like the electric power grid; not only does it link power to consumer, it also links many generators together,’ he notes. ‘Grid computing was pioneered in the scientific community, where people not only need a lot of computing power, but also need to federate data sources.’ An illustration of this can be found in the grid computing system currently under development to deal with the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at CERN, Geneva:
www.scientific-computing.com
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD JUNE/JULY 2010
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‘It’s a rather curious example; it links together computers at literally hundreds of universities, to enable analysis of LHC data. If you were designing something from scratch to analyse data, this isn’t necessarily the way that you’d do it, but the way that physicists like to do things is that everybody comes to
the party with their own computers – their own contributions if you like.’
While a large organisation such as CERN may have tens of thousands of idle CPUs on its internal network, most HPC users do not. National and international grid initiatives have gone some way towards ensuring that academic users have access to the resources they need, but these solutions are not extended to business users and they lack the true on-demand component of cloud computing. According to Foster, a grid makes the most of what its users contribute to it, whereas cloud computing is designed from the outset as a service. ‘The cloud is about out-sourcing, and grids are about federation.’ Cloud services offer users processors and storage space to be billed per unit time. The best-known current example is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which offers users a wide choice of configurable virtual
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