[Beowulf] Using commercial clouds for HPC

[Rayson Ho]

See Edward Walker's paper:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2008-10/openpdfs/walker.pdf

Rayson



On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:19 PM, stephen mulcahy
<smulcahy at atlanticlinux.ie> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm pretty sure this came up in some shape or form at some stage on this
> list but after extensive Googling and Swishing(!?) of the list I can't find
> anything concrete so apologies if I'm restarting an old thread.
>
> Has anyone done any investigation into using commerical clouds such as
> Amazon's EC2 for HPC type loads?
>
> I'm still not entirely clear on whether they are a suitable alternative from
> a software/hardware perspective or whether they have lots of hidden
> bottlenecks due to their virtual nature that HPC codes would run badly
> and/or not at all (obviously depending on the specific code).
>
> Also, if anyone is using these for HPC type loads, how does the pricing work
> out relative to owning your own similar sized cluster (if anyone has done
> those numbers)? I notice that EC2 has different pricing for "high cpu" - but
> I wonder is this typical business app "high cpu" (little 25% spikes every
> few minutes) or typical hpc app "high cpu" (long 90% spikes all the time :)
>
> Experiences and thoughts welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -stephen
>
> --
> Stephen Mulcahy     Atlantic Linux         http://www.atlanticlinux.ie
> Registered in Ireland, no. 376591 (144 Ros Caoin, Roscam, Galway)
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>