HPC PROJECTS: CLOUD COMPUTING
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rather than amortisation of a capital expense [internally owned servers].’
A sprint or a marathon
According to ANL’s Foster, Amazon’s cloud services were initially designed to support the specific set of e-commerce workloads coming out of the company’s main business. ‘They provided services for queuing and content distribution and so forth, and some of the main users have been companies with these kinds of demands – [online video rental firm] Netflicks, for example, now runs its business on EC2,’ he notes. Foster states that the nodes offered by EC2 are of a good standard, but that they’re not well interconnected. ‘If you’re running an application that requires a high-speed interconnect, it’s not going to run well on a service like Amazon’s. On the other hand, if the application is fairly compute- intensive, and if there isn’t communication between processors, then these sorts of systems work quite effectively.’ Cycle’s Jason Stowe categorises the potential users of cloud computing: ‘There are two types of HPC – there’s the sprinter type, where we have users trying to run a highly parallel application, and then there’s the marathon runner type of HPC, in which applications are pleasantly parallel.’ In the sprinter type applications, he says, latency is of key importance, and performance must be optimised at every level to get results. In contrast, Stowe describes marathon applications (which he says form the bulk of the demand for HPC) as ‘high throughput computing, and not necessarily high performance computing’. SGI’s recently launched Cyclone cloud service aims to cater for both scale- up (sprint) and scale-out (marathon) applications. Christian Tanasescu, general manager of Cyclone and VP of software engineering at SGI, describes the company’s offering: ‘As opposed to other cloud offerings, mostly based on established, older technologies, our approach aims to offer a choice of the best available technology. We offer scale-up systems (large, shared-memory machines for data analytics) and scale-out machines (for scalable applications).’ As well as offering virtual clusters at a range of sizes (2,000, 512, or 128 cores) with high-speed InfiniBand interconnects, Cyclone clusters can be configured to include HPC-specific components such as GPU accelerators (both
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Scale-up applications -– those requiring the most sophisticated compute hardware – can now be catered for alongside parallel ‘marathon’ tasks by HPC-oriented cloud services
Nvidia Tesla for DP and ATI for SP) and the new line of integer accelerators from SGI’s partner company Tilera. Tanasescu notes that both IBM and Penguin Computing also offer services along similar lines.
Encouraging users
Foster speculates as to factors preventing more customers from making use of cloud processing: ‘People have been concerned about security, and there are a variety of worries: If a user’s data is stored somewhere external, there’s a fear that it could be
‘It’s new, but it’s not a revolution’
stolen – if somebody breaks into Amazon for example. People also worry about the possibility of cross-talk between applications running on one server, although this is just theoretical really. In the US there’s also a concern about legal issues; data on Amazon is more easily accessible to the government than data on your personal hard drive, and a search warrant is not required to access it.’ Cycle’s Stowe states that his company has been careful to ensure security for its clients from the outset: ‘Actually, we thank our lucky stars that we got started with finance and defence customers, as they tend to have exceptionally stringent security requirements. When we built the cluster systems that we have, we built in a number of security measure that the clients use internally,’ he says.
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD JUNE/JULY 2010
Despite the hype surrounding cloud services, will users make use of them? Songnian Zhou is CEO of Platform Computing, a company that has recently added the cloud management software to its existing range of cluster and grid management tools. Zhou believes that cloud computing represents a particularly attractive opportunity to users within scientific computing, in that the cloud is ‘complementary and supplemental’ to the work that users have been carrying out using clusters and grids. ‘I think cloud is a significant advance,’ he says, adding that making the switch to the cloud need not be difficult: ‘Through configuration, and not programming, these customers can build their own cloud. It’s new, but it’s not a revolution for them – they all know supercomputing, and they all know how to run an application on commodity clusters. Ideally, all of this is mostly for the IT people to worry about anyway! The end users should get the benefit without ever knowing that they are running their applications in the cloud; the whole idea of cloud computing is to virtualise and insulate the resources away from users and their applications.’
Foster summarises the indistinct nature of cloud computing when he describes it as ‘partly a business model and partly a usage model. Cloud providers have a set of services that are good for a particular set of applications, and I think that the users are still learning in order to fully understand what those [applications] are.’
www.scientific-computing.com
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