high-performance computing


for the eMedLAb data centre was driven by prior use of cloud technology. ‘Prior to establishing eMedLab we had


a small cluster that was held at Barts (St Bartholomew’s Hospital) hospital to look at cardiovascular data’ said Pallas. ‘Tis was based on VMware, which was a technology that we already had in-house at UCL as part of the FARR Institute for Health Informatics.’ ‘By the time we started looking at the


design for eMedLab, OpenStack was more mature than it had been so we felt it was less of a risk to adopt this open-source cloud technology. Te other reason is the cost effectiveness of the options the integrators presented us.’ Using cloud technology like OpenStack on


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cloud-scale architectures and the benefits of it are starting to become fairly well understood.’ ‘We are not at the stage yet where


everything is going to be in the cloud but what I do believe is that we have certain use cases that work very well within a cloud environment.’ As Power describes, the cloud may not


be right for everyone, and it is not designed to be, but there are a growing number of scenarios where the cloud can add value and save considerable money for an organisation with growing computing requirements. In the opinion of Power, there will be a


mixed approach to using these HPC-based cloud services: ‘Traditional users, HPC centres will always have their own internal cluster resources, and I do not think that will change any time soon,’ he stated. ‘Tey may want to augment some of their research capabilities with external devices. Tis could be through cloud or collaboration with other research facilities to leverage those resources.’ ‘You will have a cloud-like infrastructure


for research and HPC, and then you will have users that want to dip in and out of using cloud technology’ concluded Power. One example of using the cloud as a tool


to facilitate varied research infrastructure is the emedLab facility. Te eMedLab data centre was setup as a co-located data centre that supports a consortium of seven UK universities and research institutes including University College London (UCL), Francis Crick Institute, Kings College London, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Queen Mary University of London, Welcome Trust Sanger Institute,


20 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD


and the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute. Jacky Pallas, director of research


platforms, University College London, stated: ‘eMedLab was originally funded through the MRC (Medical Research Council) in the UK. One aspect of the £8.9 million grant was to establish a common shared infrastructure where we could hold very large data sets that would be used by multiple users, and then an elastic compute resource where people could bring their own data and use the central depository data to do their analyses.’ Pallas explained that the varied user


requirements meant that the facility needed to support many different types of workflow, but also support high-speed networking to move large data sets so they can be processed for research. ‘Te user requirements were very varied from people wanting to do sequence and genome analysis to medical imaging analysis and clinical record and phenotype data, so we decided to go for the cloud environment, that would be flexible enough to meet the diverse needs of the research community that we were supporting.’ Pallas said that this computing facility is


more focused on high-performance data analytics (HPDA) rather than true HPC. However, the networking requirements are similar, as the users require a fast interconnect and a focus on memory bandwidth across the entire compute infrastructure. Te eMedLab data centre is based on


OpenStack, a free and open-source soſtware platform for cloud computing. Pallas explained that the decision to use OpenStack


what would be considered a supercomputer can provide huge flexibility in how that system is used. Te cloud infrastructure allows users to quickly provision compute resources – up to 6,000 cores in some cases – to carry out research projects. Tis flexibility helps to maximise


utilisation of the system, but it also makes provisioning resources much easier, particularly for bioinformatics domain experts who may have little experience in traditional HPC. While no one technology can solve the


problems faced by every engineer and scientist, increasingly the cloud offers the


YOU WILL HAVE A CLOUD-LIKE


INFRASTRUCTURE FOR RESEARCH AND HPC, AND THEN YOU WILL HAVE USERS THAT WANT TO DIP IN AND OUT OF USING CLOUD TECHNOLOGY


flexibility to suit varied workloads. Another benefit to the cloud, as the eMedLab example demonstrates, is that it facilitates the sharing of data between multiple organisations and can be used to co-locate facilitates and data, further reducing costs as multiple copies of large data sets are unnecessary. In the opinion of UCL’s Jack Pallas, the


cloud is a particularly powerful tool for scientific research. ‘Now we are in an era of big data and team science, where not one university or research group can solve all the complex challenges we are faced with. Cloud offers that flexibility to address multiple questions within a research project.’ l


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