Grids, Clouds, and Massive Simulations

Author(s):  
Levente Hajdu ◽  
Jérôme Lauret ◽  
Radomir A. Mihajlović

In this chapter, the authors discuss issues surrounding High Performance Computing (HPC)-driven science on the example of Peta science Monte Carlo experiments conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), one of the US Department of Energy (DOE) High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) research sites. BNL, hosting the only remaining US-based HENP experiments and apparatus, seem appropriate to study the nature of the High-Throughput Computing (HTC) hungry experiments and short historical development of the HPC technology used in such experiments. The development of parallel processors, multiprocessor systems, custom clusters, supercomputers, networked super systems, and hierarchical parallelisms are presented in an evolutionary manner. Coarse grained, rigid Grid system parallelism is contrasted by cloud computing, which is classified within this chapter as flexible and fine grained soft system parallelism. In the process of evaluating various high performance computing options, a clear distinction between high availability-bound enterprise and high scalability-bound scientific computing is made. This distinction is used to further differentiate cloud from the pre-cloud computing technologies and fit cloud computing better into the scientific HPC.

Author(s):  
Adrian Jackson ◽  
Michèle Weiland

This chapter describes experiences using Cloud infrastructures for scientific computing, both for serial and parallel computing. Amazon’s High Performance Computing (HPC) Cloud computing resources were compared to traditional HPC resources to quantify performance as well as assessing the complexity and cost of using the Cloud. Furthermore, a shared Cloud infrastructure is compared to standard desktop resources for scientific simulations. Whilst this is only a small scale evaluation these Cloud offerings, it does allow some conclusions to be drawn, particularly that the Cloud can currently not match the parallel performance of dedicated HPC machines for large scale parallel programs but can match the serial performance of standard computing resources for serial and small scale parallel programs. Also, the shared Cloud infrastructure cannot match dedicated computing resources for low level benchmarks, although for an actual scientific code, performance is comparable.


Green computing is a contemporary research topic to address climate and energy challenges. In this chapter, the authors envision the duality of green computing with technological trends in other fields of computing such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud computing on one hand and economy and business on the other hand. For instance, in order to provide electricity for large-scale cloud infrastructures and to reach exascale computing, we need huge amounts of energy. Thus, green computing is a challenge for the future of cloud computing and HPC. Alternatively, clouds and HPC provide solutions for green computing and climate change. In this chapter, the authors discuss this proposition by looking at the technology in detail.


Author(s):  
Atta ur Rehman Khan ◽  
Abdul Nasir Khan

Mobile devices are gaining high popularity due to support for a wide range of applications. However, the mobile devices are resource constrained and many applications require high resources. To cater to this issue, the researchers envision usage of mobile cloud computing technology which offers high performance computing, execution of resource intensive applications, and energy efficiency. This chapter highlights importance of mobile devices, high performance applications, and the computing challenges of mobile devices. It also provides a brief introduction to mobile cloud computing technology, its architecture, types of mobile applications, computation offloading process, effective offloading challenges, and high performance computing application on mobile devises that are enabled by mobile cloud computing technology.


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 1985-1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Siuta ◽  
Gregory West ◽  
Henryk Modzelewski ◽  
Roland Schigas ◽  
Roland Stull

Abstract As cloud-service providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft decrease costs and increase performance, numerical weather prediction (NWP) in the cloud will become a reality not only for research use but for real-time use as well. The performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model on the Google Cloud Platform is tested and configurations and optimizations of virtual machines that meet two main requirements of real-time NWP are found: 1) fast forecast completion (timeliness) and 2) economic cost effectiveness when compared with traditional on-premise high-performance computing hardware. Optimum performance was found by using the Intel compiler collection with no more than eight virtual CPUs per virtual machine. Using these configurations, real-time NWP on the Google Cloud Platform is found to be economically competitive when compared with the purchase of local high-performance computing hardware for NWP needs. Cloud-computing services are becoming viable alternatives to on-premise compute clusters for some applications.


Author(s):  
Dazhong Wu ◽  
Xi Liu ◽  
Steve Hebert ◽  
Wolfgang Gentzsch ◽  
Janis Terpenny

Cloud computing is an innovative computing paradigm that can potentially bridge the gap between increasing computing demands in computer aided engineering (CAE) applications and limited scalability, flexibility, and agility in traditional computing paradigms. In light of the benefits of cloud computing, high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud has the potential to enable users to not only accelerate computationally expensive CAE simulations (e.g., finite element analysis), but also to reduce costs by utilizing on-demand and scalable cloud computing resources. The objective of this research is to evaluate the performance of running a large finite element simulation in a public cloud. Specifically, an experiment is performed to identify individual and interactive effects of several factors (e.g., CPU core count, memory size, solver computational rate, and input/output rate) on run time using statistical methods. Our experimental results have shown that the performance of HPC in the cloud is sufficient for the application of a large finite element analysis, and that run time can be optimized by properly selecting a configuration of CPU, memory, and interconnect.


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