HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Tech focus: Cloud computing
ROBERT ROE TAKES A LOOK AT THE CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES AVAILABLE TO RESEARCHERS USING HPC
Cloud technologies are now reaching a level of maturity that is making them appealing to HPC users. Whether using public or hybrid cloud, these technologies offer unprecedented flexibility for users who can create or ‘spin-up’ nodes with specific architectural requirements, use cloud bursting to increase the capacity of their in- house infrastructure – or it can increase the agility of a company that shares data over multiple sites. In previous years there have
been some concerns around security or the cost of moving data to and from the cloud, but these reservations are slowly being eroded as more users see value in developing a cloud infrastructure as part of their HPC resource. One aspect of designing
and procuring HPC systems in the past was the need to create a balanced architecture. This means looking at the kind of applications that will be run
10 Scientific Computing World Summer 2021
on a particular cluster to try and match the requirements of applications with the technologies that are needed. For example, some workloads require large memory nodes, high-speed storage or interconnects or high- performance storage. In a perfect world, all of
these technologies could be included in a single system but, in reality, this is not feasible for most HPC centres as the cost of such a system would increase drastically. Cloud HPC allows people setting up this infrastructure to make more efficient decisions, particularly if they are cloud bursting or
developing a hybrid cloud strategy – as they can build their in-house resources to cater for around 80 per cent of the user requirements while using the cloud to provide GPUs or specific node architectures that suit a small number of users. This allows all applications
to benefit from this balanced architectural approach, while still being able to cater to the specialised applications that have more niche requirements.
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infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud Elastic High Performance Computing (E-HPC) is an end-
to-end public cloud service. E-HPC provides individual users, education and research institutions, and public institutions with a fast, elastic, and secure cloud compute platform that interconnects with Alibaba Cloud products. Arista Networks is a
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