HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


A silver lining for HPC in the cloud


ROBERT ROE FINDS THAT AS CLOUD COMPUTING MATURES, IT IS ATTRACTING NEW USERS WHO ARE CHOOSING TO ADOPT IT TO SUPPLEMENT EXISTING COMPUTING RESOURCES


As cloud-based HPC technology matures, the flexibility it provides is becoming attractive to users


across a number of industries not typically seen as HPC users – from engineering and AI to medicine, media and broadcasting. Cloud-computing technology was implemented successfully in enterprise and commerce years ago, but it was not quickly adopted by HPC users. HPC and cloud were not immediately compatible as performance and the underlying hardware was not suited to HPC applications. There has been significant investment


in developing HPC specific technology for use in cloud computing, and this is now available from both large-scale cloud providers and smaller companies focusing on the HPC cloud market. Cloud-based HPC can be used


to replace traditional on-premises supercomputers or clusters. But it also has other uses which can complement an existing HPC infrastructure. Cloud can provide flexible access to HPC systems and allow users to benchmark new technology – without the significant investment required for new infrastructure.


While public cloud implementations may not be suitable for HPC users that


4 Scientific Computing World October/November 2017


require the highest levels of performance, users can adopt strategies around private on-premises clouds or systems hosted by another company. Even for users with an established computing infrastructure, cloud can be used to burst additional workloads during times when work exceeds the capacity of an on-premises cluster.


Growing organically David Power, CTO for cloud computing provider, vScaler, explained that the company has been developing and growing organically to support customers that were not initial targets of the technology. He explained that what started off as a


focus towards delivering traditional HPC technology, such as high-performance hardware, low-latency fabric and high- bandwidth storage, was applicable to a growing number of application areas outside of the traditional academic HPC users. ‘We initially covered quite a broad spectrum on the academic and research computing domain, but as we have been going out and speaking to people we are now starting to work with the manufacturing and automotive industries. They are using HPC technologies to do a lot of internal prototyping and engineering. ‘We are also working with customers in media and entertainment that are using HPC technologies to do rendering and visual effects, sound effects or graphic design. They were not initial targets of our technology as we started building it, but, as we have grown, we are starting to see the foundations of HPC are applicable to a lot more domains’ said Power.


Power explained that media companies using cloud HPC for IP-based delivery ‘uses a lot of transcoding so there is a fair amount of CPU grunt needed’. ‘That has put a big requirement on the


compute power and storage, to allow companies to provide these services to their users. Strip back the application layer for delivery and transcoding and all of that stuff, and we are using HPC technology behind the scene to accelerate their workloads,’ Power stated. Power also commented that many of the vScaler users are using the company’s public cloud facility – but not necessarily for the reasons that the firm had originally envisioned. ‘While we have invested in our public


infrastructure and put a load of HPC technology in there, we are really using that more as a burst facility for customers, or as a prototyping facility,’ said Power. He explained that many of the


customers vScaler works with want to test cloud computing capabilities using the public cloud facility. Many of those customers choose to deploy their own on-premises solutions from vScaler, after having the ability to test hardware configurations and hardware to see what works best for them. Power also notes that we will continue


to see this multi-tiered approach to cloud computing, as it allows users to benchmark new technology before investing heavily in their own infrastructure. Another application area that has been


generating interest in cloud computing is AI and deep learning frameworks. The team at vScaler has been working with a company using AI and deep learning to develop autonomous vehicles. They are


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