Simons: HPC Should Leverage Enterprise Cloud Investments, Virtualization

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Josh Simons

Josh Simons

Josh Simons has posted his take-aways from the HPC Cloud panel discussion at the recent HPC User Forum. Josh is the HPC Architect for the CTO office at VMware, and his job these days is to investigate and evangelize virtualization technologies for high performance computing.

As a Cloud panelist, Josh began by putting the size of the HPC market in perspective. Josh shared his surprise that the recent VMworld conference was twice the size of SC09, and he emphasized that the Enterprise customer base and the size of vendor investments in that base dwarf those of the HPC community.

It is precisely these size disparities that ensure Cloud Computing will be defined by and driven by Enterprise IT requirements. It would be a mistake for “HPC Cloud” to be anything other than a use of “Enterprise Cloud” for HPC workloads. To do otherwise would be to lose the benefit of leveraging the large Cloud investments currently underway for the Enterprise. Work will of course still be required to ensure that these Cloud infrastructures are capable of adequately supporting HPC workloads.

I thought this was one of the best panels I’ve seen in a while, and moderator Sharan Kalwani from KAUST focused the rest of the discussion on security, data transfer, and performance. Presentations from the HPC User Forum will be posted in the coming days.