In this video from the Cloud Summerschool Almere 2013, Wolfgang Gentzsch presents: The ÜberCloud HPC Experiment – Paving the way to HPC as a Service.
There are several million of small and medium-size manufacturers around the world, most of them using workstations for their daily design and development work. However, there is often the need for more computing. Buying an expensive compute cluster is usually not an option, and renting computing power from the Cloud still comes with severe roadblocks, such as the complexity of the applications and their implementation itself, intellectual property and sensitive data, expensive data transfers, conservative software licensing, performance bottlenecks from virtualization, user-specific system requirements, and missing standards and lack of interoperability among different clouds. On the other hand, the benefits of using remote computing resources are extremely attractive: no lengthy procurement and acquisition cycles; shifting some budget from capex to the more flexible opex; gaining business flexibility by getting additional resources on demand, at your finger tip; and scaling resource usage automatically up and down according to your actual needs. The UberCloud Experiment has been designed to reduce many of the barriers mentioned above.