HPC finally climbs into the cloud

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

Although commerce and consumers have been computing in the cloud for years, the high-performance computing sector has been more hesitant. But all that may now be changing. The cost of cloud computing for HPC is falling, while new programming models that will allow HPC workloads to run more efficiently in the cloud are becoming available. ‘Public cloud’ providers are installing hardware configurations that are more suited to HPC, while private clouds are giving users experience of how to run their jobs in a cloud environment.

Nonetheless, HPC in the cloud has not got off to a flying start. The market research company Intersect360 reported last year that the HPC users they surveyed spent only about three per cent of their budgets on cloud computing – and the percentage has not changed much over the past five years…

One of the barriers is simply cost – initial claims that the cloud could lower the cost of high-performance computing owed more to marketing hype than to reality. According to Andrew Jones, leader of HPC consulting and services at NAG: ‘If you can keep your machine busy enough, a dedicated solution is cheaper than the cloud. One general rule of thumb is that, if you are going to keep a machine more than half busy more than half the time, then it’s more economic to do it in-house, rather than on a cloud infrastructure’…

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