HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Tech Focus: Cloud
A ROUNDUP OF CLOUD TECHNOLOGY PROVIDERS THAT SUPPORT RESEARCHERS USING HPC
Cloud computing provides huge potential to scientists
and researchers, who can use the technology to access computing resources or new and emerging technology. Cloud also facilitates
collaboration, helps organisations to scale quickly and can provide security and ease of use for domain experts accessing complex computing architectures – enabling researchers to get the most out of their investment in computing resources. Cloud technology has now
reached a level of maturity that is making it appealing to HPC users. Whether using public or hybrid cloud, the technology offers 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. Cloud enables organisations
to access emerging technologies such as quantum computing hardware without the investment in prototype technologies. Users can adopt a strategy to learn and understand how a computing
10 Scientific Computing World Summer 2022
system can impact their business using a pay-per-use model, which enables them to evaluate new technology and then scale as necessary. 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 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. 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 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.
Other products Based on Alibaba Cloud 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
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