High Performance Computing in a Cloud Using OpenStack
Roman Ledyayev, Harald H. Richter · 2014
Abstract—Cloud computing is a rapidly gaining popularity computing paradigm, prompted by much research efforts. However, not much work is done in the area of joining cloud computing with high performance computing in an efficient way, e.g., for scientific simulation purposes. Moreover, there is even less research effort in making cloud computing for scientific simulations more efficient and suitable for specific simulation codes. This paper presents an ongoing “SimPaaS” project – our research efforts in building a cloud based platform for scientific simulations. It deals with some challenging features in cloud computing, such as performance. The concepts and methods proposed in this paper allow customizing and optimizing cloud infrastructure to increase its performance and to meet certain requirements, drawn from the analysis of case study simulation codes. Even though clouds are not the most suitable environments for high performance computing, the conclusion was drawn that there are ways to increase cloud performance and effectively combine the two paradigms. Keywords-simulation; cloud computing; High Performance Computing; OpenStack; VM