cloud A
lthough commerce and consumers have been computing in the cloud for years, the high-performance computing sector has been more
hesitant. But all that may now be changing. Te cost of cloud computing for HPC is falling,
while new programming models that will allow HPC workloads to run more efficiently in the cloud are becoming available. ‘Public cloud’ providers are installing hardware configurations that are more suited to HPC, while private clouds are giving users experience of how to run their jobs in a cloud environment. Nonetheless, HPC in the cloud has not got off
to a flying start. Te market research company Intersect360 reported last year that the HPC users they surveyed spent only about three per cent of their budgets on cloud computing – and the percentage has not changed much over the past five years. One of the barriers is simply cost – initial
claims that the cloud could lower the cost of high- performance computing owed more to marketing hype than to reality. According to Andrew Jones, leader of HPC consulting and services at NAG: ‘If you can keep your machine busy enough, a dedicated solution is cheaper than the cloud. One general rule of thumb is that, if you are going to keep a machine more than half busy more than half the time, then it’s more economic to do it in- house, rather than on a cloud infrastructure’. Deepak Khosla, founder and CEO of X-ISS,
said that, in the past: ‘If you had a predictable workload and a predictable backlog of business, then it did not make any sense to go to the cloud. It was 10 times more expensive.’ Compute cycles were not the only cost issue, he added: ‘Tere is a pretty significant cost to just leaving data in – or
24 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
HPC finally climbs into the
After a shaky start, interest in migrating HPC to the cloud is growing rapidly. Tom Wilkie reports
egress of data from – the cloud. Cost has always been an issue.’ However, Khosla pointed out that the situation
is changing: ‘Over the last couple of years, [the public cloud providers] have brought their prices down significantly – both compute and storage’. Nonetheless, as an HPC consulting company, the feedback that X-ISS getting from its customers is that for regular, predictable workloads, the cloud is still at least twice as expensive as in-house solutions. Jones also believed that the financial calculus will change over time as the costs of both cloud and in-house solutions evolve.
The cost of software licences Te price of compute-cycles in the cloud, and of getting and keeping data there, are not the only factors impeding wider use. Khosla said: ‘Licencing has been a pain because the idea behind the cloud is pay-per-use but the major independent soſtware vendors (ISVs) haven’t changed their model for licencing to that. Tese guys are expensive. Tey have a pretty tight hold on their customer base. My gut feeling is that for as long as they can maximise that revenue, they will.’ A significant sign of change is that some of the
major ISVs are now offering their soſtware over the cloud – or even acting as cloud providers themselves. In January 2016, the French ‘virtual prototyping’ company ESI Group, announced that it had started delivering advanced engineering modelling and simulation in the cloud, across multiple physics and engineering disciplines, using Amazon Web Services. Almost a year earlier, in May 2015, Ansys also chose Amazon Web Services for the launch of the Ansys Enterprise Cloud for engineering simulation.
On the other hand, the Mathworks has imposed geographical restrictions on the availability of Matlab on the cloud: Matlab Distributed Computer Server for Amazon EC2 is confined to North America and some European countries – excluding Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia, for example. In Khosla’s view, the ISVs ‘are going to have to
change, or they will start losing. As people like ESI, or Open Source competition starts to come in, customers will start to say “we cannot afford to pay”. Tose that have locked-in their customer base – because it’s pretty hard to move – are going to be slower, because they want to make the most they can.’
Cloud benefits developers, not just users But cloud computing could actually be a good ally for the ISVs in the development of their own soſtware, in the view of David Lecomber, founder and chief executive of Allinea. ‘If you are an ISV – let’s say an automotive soſtware company – the chances are you don’t have a million dollars of supercomputer for your development team to use, whereas the chances are that your customer does. So if your customer reports a problem on 500 nodes, or 100 nodes, or whatever it is, then you don’t have a machine-room with that kind
@scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
