high-performance computing


is the case of “tightly coupled” workflows – these require high-speed interconnect technology. Applications that scale across many machines and pass millions of messages per second amongst themselves to coordinate parallel algorithms simply cannot afford the bottlenecks of commodity networks. Tey need much lower latency. Otherwise the scalability of these algorithms breaks down very quickly. To solve high performance computing problems, you need high-performance compute.’ Ultimately, this HPC hardware in the


cloud enables larger scale problems to be solved in less time. In cloud computing, time is money – even if unit costs are higher with HPC hardware, the total solution cost is usually lower because less compute time is required, versus utility infrastructure.’ Similarly, the technical team at vScaler has


been hard at work optimising their cloud technology to squeeze the most performance out of the technology possible. ‘We have spent quite a while optimising our cloud for HPC’ said Power. ‘If you look at the public cloud that providers were offering a few years ago it was really for lightweight workloads. A couple of VM companies were doing web serving or content serving, but that intensive use case was not there due to the inefficiencies of some of the virtualisation technologies.’ ‘We have spent the last couple of years


to high-throughput or GPU-based servers: ‘We are starting to see people that would not have used HPC traditionally’ said Power. ‘If you look at SMEs or smaller companies that are doing new product design, rapid prototyping, AI or machine learning, these guys would not have been traditional HPC users.’


HPC specific technology In November 2015 the IDC’s research vice president of high performance computing, Steve Conway, said in an interview with Scientific Computing World that the use of cloud was increasing in HPC markets but that current public cloud architectures stunted adoption of the technology. Conway said: ‘Most of the public clouds


are set up to manage embarrassingly parallel workloads, and so users are smart: they will send those embarrassingly parallel workloads off to the cloud and handle the other, less parallel, workloads in-house or some other way.’ Embarrassingly, parallel problems require little or no communication of results between tasks, which makes them much more suited to a cloud with limited


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interconnect speeds and I/O throughput. ‘If public clouds had architectures that


were more friendly to a larger portion of HPC workloads, then inevitably a larger portion of HPC workloads would be sent to the cloud,’ Conway concluded. One of the biggest drivers for the


increased use of cloud HPC is that providers are now deploying HPC-specific hardware in the cloud. While it will still take some time before we regularly see tens of thousands of cloud cores being ‘spun up’ for HPC on public clouds, it is necessary for the technology, and underlying infrastructure is in place for this technology to be successful. Reiter, of Nimbix, said: ‘HPC hardware is


very different, and while it can be emulated, it cannot be replaced. A simple example


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optimising the cloud environments so that we are getting very close to bare- metal performance on our systems. Te penalty for simplicity, ease of use, and rapid provisioning that you get with the cloud oſten came with a performance penalty but we have narrowed that gap considerably.’ ‘With Nimbix putting in hardware that


reflects what people would buy as part of an HPC cluster, we have taken the same approach and put GPUs and InfiniBand networks and parallel storage, all of the usual building blocks that you would see for HPC systems,’ stated Power.


A change in mindset Te availability is driving a change of mindset in both HPC users and engineers, and scientists who can now easily access cloud technology either to augment their current computing capabilities or to allow them to adopt HPC technology for new and emerging applications. Power stressed that there is a ‘convergence


between necessity and the fact that the technology has been around for a few years and there have been a lot of success stories about companies and organisations running


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