The Uber-Cloud Experiment: High Performance Technical Computing at Your Fingertips, the Next Utility?
The Uber-Cloud HPC Experiment — an initiative to identify, test and document potential solutions to the known roadblocks in high performance computing as a service — has issued an open invitation to members of the HPC community to join the second round of the experiment, where a cloud computing service model will be applied to workloads on remote cluster computing resources in the areas of HPC, computer aided engineering and the life sciences.
With the limits of our current workstations often unable to provide enough memory, simulations taking too long, and the number of jobs too small to get quality results, users are looking for ways to increase available computing power beyond workstations. Should we buy or rent? Buying additional compute power leads to all kinds of challenges in the context of a high-performance compute cluster acquisition. Recently, the other option, renting resources, became more attractive, with the advent of cloud computing.
However, there are additional challenges, such as security and data privacy, incompatible licensing models, moving data back and forth, and a dozen others. So, it’s time to experiment with how to achieve the benefits of the cloud computing model for the HPC community.
You can participate in this experiment as an industrial end-user in need of remotely accessible instant additional computing power, or as a compute resource provider, or as a software provider, or as an HPC expert. For the industry application, the team will identify the best-suited resource provider, contact the software provider, if necessary, and invite them to join the team, and an HPC expert will help to implement the application and data onto the remote resource. There is no money involved to participate in this hands-on experiment.
The Web site states: “We are all just curious to study the end-to-end process of putting the ‘Team of Four’ together, look for computational resource for the application, implement and run the workload, and get the final results back to the end-user.”
To participate in Round 2 of the experiment free-of-charge, fill in the Registration Form at http://www.hpcexperiment.com/registration