The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis
Abstract: Without a doubt cloud has reshaped the enterprise datacenter and there is an ongoing debate as to what extent this disruption will also spill into Supercomputing. Many of the concepts and capabilities that we see today in cloud were spearheaded by the Grid computing initiatives that this community introduced in the early 90s. However, the technology and economics have dramatically involved since then. Cloud is an overloaded term used to capture a wide range of characteristics including business models, technologies, operational models and user access paradigms. Although some of these considerations will be assessed based on the individual requirements of an organization, there are cloud technologies that are becoming industry standards and an integral part of the Supercomputing industry.
This presentation will focus on how leveraging cloud technologies adapted to meet the needs of Supercomputing workloads is a dominant trend that is empowering system administrators to be more productive and end users to have an experience familiar and analogous to cloud environments.
In a cloud based system management solution all capabilities are exposed to the system administrators and DevOps personnel as an open, programmable fabric that can be either integrated to a broader management ecosystem or operated separately with open source, commercial, or home-grown tools. This is the foundation for providing the necessary automation and programmability to easily expose capabilities such as policy-based self-service, multi-tenancy, and elasticity.
The cloudification of the supercomputer system management infrastructure is also a requirement for the interoperation and integration of supercomputers with public cloud environments. Although today most organizations make a binary decision to deploy their solution to a public or private cloud, it is possible that in the future hybrid cloud might become more prevalent in our industry, especially with the proliferation of processor architectures and silicon specialization.
Finally, our community has been in the forefront of researching technologies and solutions that meet the extreme requirements of our industry. The availability of an open and programable computer fabric removes any barriers to collect data and experiment.