Workflow as a Service (WFaaS) Expanding Beyond HPC
March 17, 2014
Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Nicole Hemsoth.
At the height of the first wave of the commercial cloud computing boom, around 2008, two HPC industry figures, Brian Schott and Robert Graybill, put their heads together to see how clouds might support high performance computing workloads. Their efforts led them to develop a “clearinghouse” for cloud-based HPC platforms and applications, which in turn prompted them to bundle, price, and support variations on these packages for companies and HPC centers to use along software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) lines.
Offering a service like this was novel at the time, especially for complex environments in government and manufacturing where licensing, regulation, data access and collaboration, and multiple other challenges exist. Further, while the Amazons of the world were busy building their own marketplaces, these were heavy on Web 2.0-driven applications but not robust or specific enough for many HPC workloads. Even with the eventual addition of HPC-oriented instance types and GPU accelerated nodes for rent on Amazon’s boxes, the ecosystem for high performance computing, particularly for government lab and agency users (and smaller to medium-sized manufacturers), remained underdeveloped…
Graybill noted that government adoption was slow at first, but has since exploded, particularly in terms of private clouds—but also now in public cloud environments following more recent development from a number of cloud service providers. For example, despite the application and workflow support holes for HPC, Amazon did set about to solve some of the challenges of the regulatory environment on its own through its GovCloud program (which certifies the underlying hardware and virtualization)…
Read more from the source @ http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/03/17/workflow-service-expanding-beyond-hpc/
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