Researchers Implement HPC-First Cloud Approach

HPC Wire (01/29/14) Tiffany Trader 

North Carolina State University researchers have demonstrated a proof-of-concept for a novel high-performance cloud computing platform by merging a cloud computing environment with a supercomputer. The implementations show that a fully functioning production cloud computing environment can be completely embedded within a supercomputer, allowing users to benefit from the underlying high-performance computing hardware infrastructure. The supercomputer’s hardware provided the foundation for a software-defined system capable of supporting a cloud computing environment. This “novel methodology has the potential to be applied toward complex mixed-load workflow implementations, data-flow oriented workloads, as well as experimentation with new schedulers and operating systems within an HPC environment,” the researchers say. The software utility package, Kittyhawk, serves as a provisioning engine and offers basic low-level computing services within a supercomputing system. Kittyhawk is what allowed the researchers to construct an embedded elastic cloud computing infrastructure within the supercomputer. The HPC-first design approach to cloud computing leverages the “localized homogeneous and uniform HPC supercomputer architecture usually not found in generic cloud computing clusters,” according to the researchers. This type of system has the potential to support multiple workloads, including traditional HPC simulation jobs, workflows that involve both high-performance computing and non-high performance computing analytics, and data-flow orientation work.

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