Oil Company Drills into HPC Cloud Issues
April 7, 2014
Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Nicole Hemsoth.
Danish energy company, Maersk Oil, has seen a number of technology trends evolve since its founding in 1962, particularly in terms of its ability to stay ahead of the unending race to new sources of hydrocarbons. The company’s research and technology team hasn’t been immune to the promises of cloud computing in its evaluations of potential options for powering critical simulations. In a recent experiment in conjunction with the software company behind one of their core codes, Eclipse, which is a product from Schlumberger and Amazon Web Services, Maersk put the cloud to the test for its reservoir simulation runs.
While this experiment didn’t yield a great deal in terms of surprises performance-wise, it did raise some important questions about critical side topics in cloud for high performance computing codes. License models, overall cost, and the potential for “cloud gateway” services as delivered by companies like Panzura made this test use of public cloud resources noteworthy, even if the goal was not to come up with a world class-level infrastructure alternative…
In a recent conversation with Maersk’s head of server infrastructure, Thomas O’Reilly, he told us the intention of what the team did “was not to move our production HPC stuff into the cloud.” Rather, he says, “the point was to open a conversation about the possibilities of cloud in general and use this as an example of what might be possible.” The company provided a diagram to highlight their effort, emphasizing the differences between their bare metal environment, the cloud with multiple options in terms of configuration. He noted that the limitations to their test were Schlumberger’s requirements for running the code on certain CPUs, network cards, etc. as well as running before the newest generation of Amazon Ivy Bridge-based servers were available…
Read more from the source @ http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/04/07/oil-company-drills-hpc-cloud-issues/
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