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high-performance computing
of machine in, but you can reproduce that same problem on the Amazon cloud. In a morning, you can get that machine, pay for it by the hour, and turn it off when you are done. So I think that’s going to be really interesting for more soſtware companies. Even larger ISVs wouldn’t have the size of system that their main customers have. Te economics wouldn’t work out for them.’ In perfect
THERE IS A PRETTY SIGNIFICANT COST TO JUST LEAVING DATA IN THE CLOUD
accord with the judgements of Jones and Khosla, he remarked that if a machine is going to be 95 per cent busy: ‘It makes sense to own it. But for intermittent use, then it makes total sense to rent.’ A subtly different application of cloud
techniques in internal soſtware development was identified by Matthijs van Leeuwen, chief executive of Bright Computing. In this case, it was not reaching out to a public cloud, but using OpenStack within the company’s own data centre to provide facilities flexibly for the company’s own development team. OpenStack is open-source soſtware for cloud computing that controls pools of hardware resources for processing, storage, and
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networking throughout a data centre. ‘We have HPC, Big Data, cloud developers,
and they need to do testing, play, and try,’ he said. ‘Tey need to stand up a cluster very quickly, use it for a while, and shut it down. Tey need to very dynamically change the size of the cluster. In the early days, they would really be messing about with physical servers and spending quite a bit of time in the data centre downstairs in the basement of our office, unplugging servers and almost fighting over them. As soon as we started playing with OpenStack, we realised that this would be a fantastic tool to allow our developers to reserve resources and build a cluster-as-a- service model. Tey start them up – all virtualised – and then shut them down. Having used it for one and a half years, it’s become stable and versatile.’ Because of their own experience in using
the package, Van Leeuwen claims that the product the company has developed from it, Bright OpenStack, ‘is the most HPC-optimised OpenStack distribution on the market.’
Different clouds, different uses Van Leeuwen makes a useful distinction that clarifies the different types of cloud technologies currently being used, by pointing to the difference between ‘cloud bursting’ and running HPC
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workloads on OpenStack in data centres. Te difference is, he explained, that: ‘the original cloud-bursting scenario is about adding more capacity in a flexible way; whereas, if you have 100 servers in your data centre, by adding OpenStack to it you don’t get a single extra CPU cycle, you’re just redistributing it in a more effective, more efficient manner.’ Even within cloud bursting, which Bright has
been offering for several years, there are two distinct scenarios. Te first is to set up a ‘cluster in the cloud, an independent but complete HPC cluster in, for example, Amazon. Te second is where you extend an on-premise existing cluster into the cloud. Your control and management node is still in your data-centre, but some of the additional servers are in the cloud.’ Te hybrid of traditional, on-premise, bare metal extended into a virtualised public cloud is the more popular option, and the use case is straightforward, he said, because it is a way of responding to varying demands throughout the year for HPC resources. What surprised Bright, however, was the
degree of interest among HPC customers for the OpenStack option. ‘With Bright OpenStack they can build a data-centre infrastructure where they can offer their own internal users a choice: today, do they want to run today an HPC application, a big data application, or other workloads? Tey can
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